Amazon suffers technical glitch on 'Super Saturday'

It would appear that even the giant of giant etailers is not immune to the odd technical glitch. Amazon on Saturday suffered an outage with shoppers unable to make purchases, a glitch that could cost the e-commerce company millions of dollars in revenue.

The shopping carts on amazon.com were full on Saturday, but due to unknown technical errors shoppers couldn't proceed to checkout as the items in their carts appeared unavailable.

The outage, which happened for only 30 minutes early evening on its US, mobile and Canadian websites, happened on one of the most busiest shopping days of the year known as Super Saturday, the last weekend before the Christmas holiday.

There were plenty of social media posts from unhappy customers, who reportedly received error messages on their screen when they were unable to make payments: “Oops! We’re very sorry, but we’re having trouble doing what you just asked us to do. Please give us another chance — click the back button on your browser and try your request again. Or start from the beginning on our home page.”

Amazon, despite being the leading e-commerce destination, is not immune to outages. An August 2013 crash lasting 45 minutes reportedly cost the site an estimated 4.72 million dollars.

Mortimer Singer, a retail analyst partner at Marvin Traub Associates told WWD: "Given that it was Super Saturday, it is a positive indicator for the high traffic Amazon is getting — assuming it wasn't a hack, but the weight of the traffic."

Photo credit: Screenshot Amazon error message