Prime Day Seems To Be Messing With Amazon's Streaming Services

Today is Amazon's Prime Day, a special day where the site offers great deals to Amazon Prime members. Unfortunately, the event is so popular right now that even getting onto Amazon.com can be an issue. It's so bad, that you might decide to wait it out by putting on a movie, but if you do, you better hope it's not hosted by Amazon. The site's issues are so widespread that you currently can't purchase any content through Amazon video, nor can you easily watch anything you currently own.

If you can actually get deep enough onto Amazon.com to see the deals Prime Day is currently running on digital TV shows and movies, you'll discover that several movies, such as the movie above, last year's Oscar nominee All the Money in the World, are on special. You can buy it for $4.99 right now. Or at least you could, if there was a button available allowing you to purchase it. Right now, as far as I can tell, the entire Amazon Video library is listed as "unavailable." The issues are not limited to buying something new. Attempts to watch something you bought through Amazon Video previously is likely to end up giving you an error message.

This is certainly a live issue so everything is subject to change, and change back, without notice. Amazon Prime Day began at noon Pacific Time and from minute one the site began to experience problems that were almost certainly brought on by the influx of users looking for those hot deals. While the special deals are limited to members of Amazon Prime, a lot of people fork over that subscription fee for free shipping if nothing else. The Prime Video service, which offers a lot of free content, similar to Hulu or Netflix, is also available to members.

Since many of the Prime Day deals are short-term, lasting only a few hours, it's possible that these deals could expire before people actually have the ability to make a purchase. We'll have to wait and see how Amazon deals with the fallout, which they can only do after they fix the underlying issues.

This isn't Amazon's first Prime Day, so it's unclear what those underlying issues are. The online retailer was clearly getting ready for the big day and knew things were going to be nuts at least on par with Cyber Monday, if not more so since there isn't a lot of competition trying to go head to head with Amazon right now.

Amazon Web Services host a lot more than simply Amazon's traffic, so it's also possible other websites are having problems due to Prime Day. Hopefully, these issues won't be lasting too much longer.