Instead of the boring, standard 404 pages, Amazon redirected customers to adorable pictures of puppies. Amazon’s Source: The Digital Reader

It was a bad day in the office for Amazon this afternoon. The global online retailer experienced some technical problems and product pages could not load. The entire site was basically down and while you could still get to the home page, individual product pages were not working. But, there was one thing that really caught the attention of many users. Instead of the boring message “The page is down, please try again later”, the site redirected users to cute puppies dubbed Amazon dogs.

What was even more amazing though was that every time you refreshed or tried another page, you were simply redirected to another cute puppy. Even though the outage on a normal day would have caused a lot of inconvenience and of course disappointment for all the users, the puppies made things a little easier to handle. It was fun, entertaining and above all, it made people smile. It is not yet clear why the website was down but this is still a developing story and there is no doubt that Amazon is expected to come out soon enough and explain what happened.

The puppies, also called the Amazon dogs, popped up with some adorable information about each of them. Source: Amazon

It’s not also the first time the site has been down so there is nothing major to worry about. It’s the first time though that the online retailer had decided to redirect users to cute puppies. Whether it was a deliberate move designed to manage the disappointment of users or not, one thing is clear, it worked and instead of the usual tweets about how the outage, the conversation was more on the cute puppies online.

One tweet from a user suffering the outage read “Sorry about the outage, here are some cute puppies for you, it’s almost like they planned it!” Another read “While Amazon is down, I have got a chance to meet the cute Amazon dogs”.

In essence, the strategy was to keep users entertained while the online retailer worked on the website. While it’s not clear whether the next time there is an outage we will still see images of cute dogs to keep us busy, one thing to be sure of is that Amazon won’t use the boring “This page is down, try again later” message. Many experts agree that the online retailer managed the situation very creatively.

These adorable Amazon dogs made the website outage much more bearable. Source: Amazon

Even though the idea of using puppies was a no brainer, the fact that every time you clicked a different page you were redirected to a different dog made it worth the while for the millions of users who were trying to access the products at the site. Maybe next time it will be cute cats, who knows? The website has since been restored and all the broken pages that were malfunctioning are now in full capacity.

So, for those who missed the puppy show, maybe try next time when there is an outage. Never before have people been so happy about a website outage and no less an Amazon outage, one of the most important websites online.