Here's the story behind the dogs you're seeing on the Amazon Prime Day error pages
- Many people trying to access Amazon's homepage during Prime Day were greeted with error messages — messages featuring a selection of cute dogs.
- The 'dogs of Amazon' featured in these pages are dogs owned by the employees that come to work with their owners.
- "At Amazon, bring-your-dog-to-work day is every day," a blog post by the company reads.
It's a little hard to be frustrated at a website's error message when there's a little four-legged friend staring back at you.
That's what plenty of Amazon customers saw at the onset of Prime Day 2018 when Amazon's website appeared to go down for many users.
Refreshing the page brings up a different dog, with the message "Sorry — something went wrong on our end. Please go back and try again or go to Amazon's home page." Clicking on the link to the home page only resulted in another dog popping up on the screen, with the same error message.
But these messages are nothing new — dogs have been a part of Amazon's 404 'page not found' error pages since at least 2006, Forbes reports.
The 'dogs of Amazon' are dogs that belong to Amazon employees, and come with their owners to work, as explained in an Amazon blog post. According to Amazon, nearly 6,000 dogs come to work with their owners at the Seattle headquarters, and "At Amazon, bring-your-dog-to-work day is every day," the blog post says.
The blog continues to explain that this dog-friendly tradition extends back to the beginning of the company, when a couple working at Amazon brought their Welsh Corgi, Rufus, to work with them — where "employees would use Rufus’ paw to click the computer mouse to launch some of the earliest pages of Amazon.com," the blog says.
Reception desks at Amazon have dog treats, the blog says, and the campus is complete with a "doggie deck" where dogs can blow off some steam and play with each other.
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