AmazonFail postmortem: furor subsiding, hacking denied

It began with a quiet post by an author on Sunday, but by Monday, it was a national controversy and an instant go-to for anyone out to prove the power of Twitter.

Over the weekend, an author noticed that several gay-themed books, which included one of his own, lost sales rankings on Amazon.com. Although the listings remained, rankings are considered one of the most powerful ways to sell books, so the author wrote to Amazon’s customer service and asked what happened. He received this in response: “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.”

 

The author maintained that his book wasn’t “adult,” a reader brought the perceived anti-gay measures to Twitter, and it exploded from there. By Sunday night, posts streamed in by the second. In Twitter parlance, it was coined “#amazonfail.” (Once Amazon dismissed the criticism as a “glitch,” the tag became “#glitchmyass.”)

Amazon’s confused response made the problem worse. As first, it was just a “glitch,” and the company restored the books' sales rankings. Later, a spokesperson became more conciliatory: “This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.” Amazon also sought to distance itself from the widespread spin that the problem affected only LGBT books, because evidently other titles in categories like heath and sexuality were also affected.

Still, internal sources at the company provided more different accounts of the problem. And on Monday, well-known troll Weev took credit for the incident on his LiveJournal, but, somewhat puzzlingly, Amazon rebuffed his claim and said that the incident was exclusively the result of company error. 

Whatever the case, by Tuesday night, the breathless outrage quieted. The long-term fallout of the story will no doubt be fodder for endless speculation in coming weeks, but tweets continued in smaller numbers early Wednesday morning, many from users confused over who the ultimate culprit turned out to be.