Amazon Ad Portal Crashes On Opening Night Of 'Prime Day'

Amazon's advertising portal crashed Tuesday night, temporarily disrupting the company's Prime Day sales event. It also disrupted the ability for media buyers to log in to the platform.

Some believe this is a sign that companies like Amazon need to make provisions to add additional infrastructure as more people increase the amount they spend and the number of purchases made online.

Consumers spent $7.2 billion on July 16, the first day of the Prime Day event, Adobe Analytics data shows. This represents 11.7% growth year-over-year (YoY) and marks the single biggest ecommerce day in 2024.

The outage affected the self-service ad platform, but not the sellers who depend on the platform for managing their advertising campaigns, an Amazon spokesperson told Media Daily News

"A very small portion of advertisers have had limited access to the Amazon Ads console for a brief amount of time and we are already resolving the issue, the Amazon spokesperson said. "There is no impact to ad delivery and advertiser campaigns continue to run as they intended."

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The crash led to frustration among advertisers and their agency partners as they struggled to access advertising dashboards and manage campaigns, said Elizabeth Marsten, vice president of innovation and growth for commerce media at Tinuiti.

Tinuiti’s account teams noted intermittent load-time issues about two hours before the full crash, Marsten said, adding that the system went down about 8:33 pm PST and came back up around 9:53 pm PST.

Skai, Tinuit’s campaign management platform partner, validated that while front-end access to Amazon Ads was impacted, manual and scheduled optimizations on the back end worked via the API.

Although she declined to comment on the outage, Criteo Executive Managing Director of the Americas Sherry Smith shared data that confirms the increase in sales Tuesday night despite the outage.

Smith said 28% of the retailers analyzed are either hosting their own sales events or benefitting from a halo effect as consumers shop. As a result, they saw an average 73% increase in online transactions Tuesday, compared with the average during the seven days preceding the event.

Criteo analyzed more than 116 million online transactions across desktops, smartphones, and tablets from more than 1,300 major retailers and ecommerce sites in the United States — outside of Amazon — during the first 24 hours of Amazon Prime Day.

 This year Amazon’s event saw a stronger halo effect for participating retailers than the 2023 event, Criteo data shows. In 2023, these same retailers and brands saw a 52% increase in online transactions. This means that the halo effect rose 21 pts year-over-year (YoY).

PriceSpider data shows that household goods and grocery emerged as the top category for the first day of Prime Day. The category captured the highest seller impressions and leads, followed by hardware and health and beauty categories. 

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