Amazon Goes Down at Start of Prime Day

According to Business Insider, CNET, TechCrunch, and a bunch of irritated would-be customers posting about it on Twitter, Amazon was having serious technical difficulties as its much-anticipated Prime Day started Monday. Outage reports spiked around 3pm Eastern, just as the 36-hour sale was starting, but the site appeared to go up and down; some users got error reports or were not able to navigate past the Prime Day landing page while others apparently had no issues or were able to find workarounds. "I saved a bunch of money today because the Amazon site is down," posted one Twitter user. One workaround appears to be using the URL smile.amazon.com rather than amazon.com. (More Amazon.com stories.)