Amazon Website, Search, Down During Apparent Outage, Photos of Dogs Replace Item Results

amazon logo reflection
This illustration picture taken on April 19, 2018, shows the logo of online retail company Amazon displayed on a tablet screen in Paris. Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images

Amazon shoppers were disappointed to find that the site was down Wednesday afternoon and in place of the website was a message that said, "Sorry something went wrong on our end."

Users were reporting the issues with the site to Down Detector and said they were having issues with the website, logging in and checking out. Users reported that the issues seemed to be happening whether they were in private hidden browser windows or regular ones and some were seeing error 503 messages and service unavailable messages.

Users were also tweeting about the apparent outage and sharing photos of the "sorry" error message and the "dogs of Amazon" that appeared on the error pages.

@amazon Why am I only seeing pictures of dogs when I try to search for something. @amazon is super damn glitchy right now.😠

— Paulette, BTS & Coffee (@pauletteleroy65) January 16, 2019

@AmazonHelp Is there a known issue with searching right now? I keep getting the Amazon dogs when searching for a phone case. Thanks!

— Dawn Nekorchuk, PhD, MSPH (@nekodawn) January 16, 2019

It was unclear what was causing the issue Wednesday or when it might be fixed and up and running normally again.

The Amazon Help account on Twitter was responding to some users who were tweeting about their issues with the website with the message, "I'm sorry to know that you're facing issue with browsing our website. Could you please help us with the screenshot of the error you're facing so that we can escalate this to concerned team?"

But to another user who tweeted about the apparent outage Amazon responded that it wasn't seeing any outage with the site at that time.

Thanks for reaching out! We're here to help! I'm not seeing any current outage. Are you receiving an error message when you try to access the site? ^TR

— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) January 16, 2019

This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.

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Nina was a breaking news reporter. She previously worked at Business Insider, The Boston Globe, and Boston.com.

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