On December 7th, 2021 – Pearl Harbor Day – while shopping on Amazon.com I wanted to browse through products related to former President Trump. So, I searched “Donald Trump”…
…and found no items for sale.
Curious, I searched just the name of a famous president or presidential wanna-be and discovered this:
Let’s Shop on Amazon!
| Name Searched | How Many Items Listed on Amazon? |
| Donald Trump | 0 |
| Joe Biden | Over 9,000 items found |
| Barack Obama | Over 2,000 items found |
| Michelle Obama | 0 |
| Bill Clinton | Over 2,000 items found |
| Hillary Clinton | Over 2,000 items found |
| Ronald Reagan | 0 |
| Jimmy Carter | 917 items found |
| Richard Nixon | Over 1,000 items found |
Notice anything peculiar? So did I.
Now, for those names showing no items listed I was able to find some items by being a little more specific: For example, entering “Hillary Clinton nutcracker” or “Donald Trump 2024 flag” did find and list some items for sale. But, this meant some names you had to have an idea of exactly what your were looking for before you found it, while for other names you could just enter their name and browse away.
Later I found out the Amazon Web Services (AWS) system had problems on the day I did my shopping:
“[11:26 AM PST] We are seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.“
Searching those same names on Amazon the next day (12/08/21) gave me results I was expecting:
Let’s Shop on Amazon (again)!
| How Many Items Listed on Amazon? | ||
| Name Searched | 12/07/2021 | 12/08/2021 |
| Donald Trump | 0 | Over 10,000 items |
| Joe Biden | Over 9,000 items | Same |
| Barack Obama | Over 2,000 items | Same |
| Michelle Obama | 0 | 936 items |
| Bill Clinton | Over 2,000 items | Same |
| Hillary Clinton | Over 2,000 items | Same |
| Ronald Reagan | 0 | Over 3,000 |
| Jimmy Carter | 929 items | Same |
| Richard Nixon | Over 1,000 | Same |
Of course, Amazon using over 1,300,000 servers located in 15 data centers around the world to handle all their data there are bound to be problems with some of them, even with backup servers available. If you’re curious as to what Amazon claims actually happened you can read Amazon’s official explanation by clicking here.
Perhaps the big names Amazon dropped as a portion of their network bombed on Pearl Harbor Day was just a coincidence…but we’ll probably never know.
Happy shopping, and…
Thanks for Reading!
