Hacker News Reader

My gut feel is that they did everything right to prepare based on forecasts from last year but still got swamped by demand.

View on HN

I have Amazon Prime, and I had no idea that today was Prime day. Haven't seen any marketing for it, and nothing in email until this morning.

The only marketing I've seen for it was the tape on my packages the last few weeks.

It has been all over the place. Unless you don't visit Amazon on a regular bases, or deals websites. I don't even watch tv often and saw ad on it.

I saw the page reload multiple times when doing a search before finally dying...I can only imagine that means additional load generated by the initial triggering failure.

Which in turn tells me they didn't test the failure case. Now, Amazon is a huge and complicated beast so I don't want to imply this was a "dumb" mistake, but (assuming I'm correct) it is a failure that risked making MORE failure, so it's not demand alone to blame.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com