Amazon’s $100 Xbox 360 A Big Bust

After being mentioned on hundreds of websites like digg and TechCrunch
Amazon.com at 11am west coast time 2pm east ground to a halt. I was one of the thousands trying to get an Xbox 360 for my son Kory and myself to play though the holidays but to my dismay 1 minute before 11am Amazon stopped responding for me. Amazon completely disappeared off the face of the earth for the first 5 mins of 11am west coast time.

After not getting any response from the website I decided to call Amazon’s customer service number (800) 201-7575 (known to very few). I was redirected to a customer service rep in India… He could barely understand me and told me and I quote “Theres nothing I can do for you at the moment sir, I cant access my control panel to Amazon.com” at which point I laughed and figured this was a waste of time. I asked him about 4 times if there was any other way I could purchase the xbox 360, perhaps over the phone or from another link. His response was one of confusion he had no idea wtf was going on (outsourcing jobs rule Amazon!).

So I hung up the phone and gave up.

There are few reports of people that actually got the deal:
Woohoo! Got one!

I reloaded at 2:00:01 EST, hit the buy button, answered a simple question (The sum of 6 and 15 is ____), and got my coupon code. Then Amazon was totally unresponsive for about 5 minutes. Eventually it came alive again and I was able to proceed with my purchase.

There are even more people that didn’t get one and like me are furious

That was a load of bullshit. they could probably tell they were getting a couple million hits on that page directed from digg.com and they still didn’t prepare for the traffic…I was loading the page from 10:59 to 11:13 by which the sale was over.
I emailed them to bitch them out.

Here’s a few screenshot’s of people that got through the process but still lost out on it.

http://img163.imageshack.us/my.php?image=amazon1uq4.jpg
http://img66.imageshack.us/my.php?image=amazon2ze5.jpg
http://img294.imageshack.us/my.php?image=amazon3uh2.jpg

In the end was it worth it Amazon to piss of thousands of people to give 1000 people a good deal? The thing that pisses me off personally is that the site went down. If the site was up the whole time and I missed out on the deal because I was slow that would have been my own fault.

This is unacceptable in my opinion and I WILL NOT BUY ONE ITEM FROM AMAZON this holiday season. I had a list of stuff I was going to purchase from Amazon tomorrow on Black Friday but I am taking my business elsewhere. Shitty website and outsourced customer service = losing customers. Get a clue Amazon.