Amazon down on Prime Day: Site not working as people shown dogs instead of deals

There are a wide variety of dogs to meet – but none of them make up for missing out on shopping for sales and offers

Amazon has stopped working on the site's most important day of the year.

As Amazon Prime Day began, shoppers took to the site to check out the time-limited deals that run through 16 and 17 July.

But instead they only saw a variety of dogs, which Amazon uses as its error page when something doesn't load properly.

Numerous users joked that the dogs were very cute and nice – but that they had come to shop, and not for a new canine.

There doesn't appear to be a way of getting around the problem, though refreshing the page should sometimes make it come back to life.

Instead, users are probably best advised to get acquainted with all of the various hounds that show on the error page. There is a wide variety of dogs of different breeds, each of which is given a name.

In fact, seeing the dog is probably lucky, since some users are reporting that the pages are instead loading slowly or not loading at all.

The issue is likely caused by the huge number of people coming to the site to check out the latest deals. Not only does the site offer a wide variety of cut-price products through the 36 hour event, many of the deals are time-limited and so require users to head back to the site repeatedly throughout the two days.

It is not the first problem to strike the day, which Amazon boasts is now bigger than Black Friday. Employees across Europe have gone on strike during the event, and experts have advised that the deals on offer might not always represent the best value.

But for those that can get through and still want to do some shopping, a wide variety of offers await. The site is offering deals on a wide variety of tech and gaming, as well as other products.