For those of you who wanted to participate in Amazon’s annual summer day of moderately good sales, you may have hit a snafu when you tried to access Amazon.com. This is because the Prime Day site was down for many people hoping to cash in on the sweet, sweet savings.
To ease the pain of not getting good deals, Amazon’s error page had pictures of cute dogs. But even that wasn’t enough, and people complained online. Indeed, the company’s stock is down in after-hours trading as the website problems persist.
This evening, Amazon finally issued a statement admitting there may have been some issues hampering the site. “Some customers are having difficulty shopping,” the company wrote via a statement on Twitter, “and we’re working to resolve the issue quickly.” But Amazon didn’t finish its thought with an apology, which is probably what any smart entrepreneur would do. Instead, it decided to sort of gloat. “Many are shopping successfully,” the statement went on, “in the first hour of Prime Day in the U.S., customers ordered more items compared the first hour last year.”
— Amazon.com (@amazon) July 16, 2018
In short, Amazon is saying “sorry you couldn’t participate in our big day, but it doesn’t matter because we still made a ton of money.” It’s a very 2018 apology, in that it isn’t an apology and is kind of calling the claims that the site is down fake news.
This probably isn’t the best way to inform users of nationwide site downtime. But will that get people to stop shopping? Probably not.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’s fortune just exceeded $150 billion, making him the richest man in the world–even while his European employees go on strike. So maybe this bizarre statement was Bezos’s way of flipping everyone off. “Sorry you’re having a bad day,” says Jeff, “but I’m doing just fine.”
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