As the old adage goes: Even the best fall down sometimes.
Over the weekend, e-tailing powerhouse Amazon.com disappointed tons of customers when its website experienced a technical glitch that temporarily prevented shoppers from placing orders.
Social media users reportedly flagged the issue on Saturday evening, complaining that they couldn’t complete their purchases on Amazon.com because the items in their shopping carts appeared unavailable when it was time to checkout.
The hiccup, which reportedly lasted for 30 minutes on Amazon’s U.S., mobile and Canadian websites, happened on one of the busiest shopping days of the year: Super Saturday.
While Amazon has yet to publicly address the glitch, some reports have suggested that even a 30-minute-long outage could cost the multibillion dollar shopping platform millions in revenues — and even more so during an intense shopping event such as Super Saturday.
According to the National Retail Federation, Dec. 17 — or Super Saturday — was expected to entice 156 million consumers to spend online and in-store, trumping the 154 million consumers that intended to shop during Thanksgiving weekend.
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Further, more than half — or 52 percent — of those Super Saturday spenders said they planned to purchase their gifts online.
Although Amazon’s ongoing success continues to serve as a business model in the e-commerce realm, this past Saturday wasn’t the first time the company fell victim to a technical glitch.
In December 2014, some U.K.-based retailers complained when their products were suddenly being sold on Amazon for one penny. And, in August 2013, Amazon experienced a rare crash that left the site inaccessible for nearly an hour and reportedly cost the company nearly $5 million.
