We now know the reason for Amazon’s brief outage on Prime Day. The retailer reportedly didn’t have enough servers to handle the traffic surge for the day, forcing it to launch a scaled-down version of its homepage and block international traffic, CNBC reports.
According to internal documents, Amazon had to manually add servers to address the issue, something CBNC says may be an indication that the company’s auto-scaling feature failed. The also appears that the issue didn’t just impact Amazon’s e-commerce site. The company’s voice-operated assistant Alexa and Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch also reportedly had functionality problems during the outage and some of its warehouses were not able to scan or package orders.
While the site’s issues lasted several hours, it doesn’t appear as though the outage had much of an impact on the company’s sales for the day. Amazon has said that Prime Day was t he biggest shopping event in the company’s history and that it sold over 1 million products during the event.