Amazon site crashes: Not ready for Prime time?

Are you seeing cute dogs on Amazon.com instead of Prime Day deals? That might be because Amazon's storefront is down -- according to many of us at CNET and a host of reports on social media -- at a rather unfortunate time for the company. Amazon (AMZN) is holding its huge Prime Day sales event today.

According to DownDetector.com, outage reports spiked around noon PT -- just as Amazon Prime Day officially began for reals -- and appear to be limited to Amazon.com in the U.S. 

Technically, some CNET staff are seeing the website (and mobile app) go up and down depending on when we refresh. Lots of 404 errors, but we also sometimes see the actual site, too. Some staffers aren't having trouble at all. 

As of 12:50p.m. PT we're generally able to see Amazon.com's homepage if we refresh, but things are still pretty borked -- we're getting errors at checkout, redirects, items in our shopping carts are mysteriously disappearing, mobile alerts are delayed, products searches are sometimes offering no results, and some of us are caught in a "Shop All Deals" loop.

No, AWS Cloud is not down, according to Amazon's status page.

In a statement, Amazon said it was "working to resolve this issue quickly."

"Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime Day in the U.S., customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year," an Amazon spokesperson said in an email. 

This is a developing story... we'll update this post with more info as we get it.