There are cheaper ways to get marketing press that don't involve kneecapping one of your two primary revenue generation engines. They've gotten at least two major news cycles just out of vaporware promises to deliver packages by drone, for instance. (It may not be vaporware forever but it certainly isn't coming soon enough to justify breathless press from a few months ago.) It's not like they don't have any idea how to drum up press.

It's happened again [1], and in less than 15 minutes!

That's it, I'm terming this the Klein effect.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17499447

This made me smile. :) This is very close to to Poe's law as well, because after all, who can tell for sure if something that simply just went-wrong was intentional or not?

Nah, not at all. The vast majority of people don't care about the inner workings of a website, they just want to buy cheap shit and have it all work. Prime Day pretty much markets itself, I just recently got a package from amazon and it was plastered with Prime Day advertising, my co-workers are all talking about it, it's the centerpiece of their website. You'd have to work pretty hard NOT to know about Prime Day today.

Any publicity is good publicity!

lol. Seriously?

Could also be an A/B test of some new infrastructure design to see if it's ready to deploy in November. I have no idea if they still hold everything together with Perl (via this templating system: http://www.masonhq.com/) but it wouldn't surprise me, and it also wouldn't surprise me that there'd be occasional pushes to replace it with something "modern" (or at least friendlier to the revolving door of new grads).

This would go down as one of the worst A/B tests in history if that is the case, which I highly doubt.

This would make a lot of sense, they essentially get a "game day" with actual sales, make a lot of money and a few months to prepare for the next wave of seasonal mob-shopping.

I don't think they're using Perl anymore however.