The XBox 360 borked Amazon
This post was published 2 years 11 months 26 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.After three days Amazon has finally address the mayhem known as their “Customer Votes” sale, acknowledging that due to heavy traffic, their web site for about 15 minutes.
The page-load problems began at about 11 a.m. Thursday, while the online retailer was offering Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 video game systems for $100 to the first 1,000 customers. An entry-level Xbox system normally retails for about $300.
“We saw dramatically more traffic than what we anticipated,” Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said Friday.
The official time it took to sell all 1,000 XBoxes sold was clocked at 29 seconds. Personally, I thought it would have been far shorter.
Conspiracy theory time. Amazon.com had no problems with page loads when it came to the PS3 preorder, and Wii pre-ordering – and I am sure that brought a considerable amount of traffic. Do you think a website that knows web traffic and e-commerce so well was really unprepared to handle all the customers trying to snag a discounted XBox 360?
It’s definitely possible. I wasn’t even aware of the “Customer Votes” gimmick until I read the story a week before on digg (and tried to snag one myself with no luck).
Interestingly enough, I was at Fry’s electronics yesterday, and there were mountains of xbox 360’s lying around, but not a Wii or PS3 in sight.
They had so many they were using them as tables and stands to display other merchandise.