Tech & Biz

Amazon Fail: Hacker, Software Glitch, or Lost in Translation?

by Tina Kells | April 17, 2009 at 07:22 pm

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A public relations nightmare hit online retailer Amazon.com hard earlier in the week and now a series of theories over why nearly 60,000 Gay and Lesbian titles lost their sales rank are starting to surface.

Amazon initially blamed a computer software glitch for the unintentional exclusion but many in the blogosphere did not accept that explanation. Literally overnight social networking sites and blogs were chanting a virtual protest using a special hashtag #AmazonFail to express their outrage.

Could all those harsh tweets have been unfair? At least two theories of the "crime" suggest that the angry reaction of the social web may have been premature.

A hacker troll has claimed responsibility saying he set out to prank Amazon.com, and a former Amazon employee is saying that something got lost in translation when the site's French filters confused the English words "adult" and "erotic."

Amazon however, is remaining true to its initial position that a computer glitch caused the confusion and has issued an official apology to customers.

Smith's e-mail seemed to indicate something along the lines of Daisey's theory.

"It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles — in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a

number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica," she wrote.

The ball got rolling early Sunday morning when Mark R. Probst, an author and publisher of gay-themed Young Adult titles, put up a blog posting detailing how "hundreds" of gay-interest titles had suddenly lost their Sales Ranks.

More blog postings went up in response, and by the end of the day Twitter feeds about "#amazonfail" were exploding.

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generaldecay

at 02:46 on April 18th, 2009

Oh, this is interesting. That would certainly explain what seemed like a very atypical move by Amazon. I'll certainly be hoping that it was a a hacker and not an executive decision on Amazon's part.