Users reported a widespread outage of the checkout system on Amazon.com starting Friday afternoon.

“There’s a technical issue which is preventing orders from being placed at the moment,” Amazon said in a message on its customer support portal. “We’re working on a solution and recommend you try again later. We’re sorry about any inconvenience this may cause.”

GeekWire confirmed Friday that the glitch was showing up when clicking “Proceed to checkout” from the Amazon shopping cart, leading to one of the company’s cute but frustrating “Dogs of Amazon” error pages, such as the one above, apologizing that “something went wrong on our end.”

After initially encountering the error message, we were able to get through to the checkout system and place an order around 3 p.m. Pacific time, but some users on Reddit and elsewhere said the problem was persisting for them as of Friday evening.

Downdetector shows that reports of the outage started to emerge around 1 p.m. Pacific time, with reports coming in from users across the United States. The number of reports leveled off but then escalated in the evening.

The outage comes as Amazon.com offers a Labor Day Weekend sale, which has left some users unable to take advantage of the discounts promised by the company.

Every minute of such an outage carries high stakes for Amazon, which generates more than 40% of its net sales from online stores, or more than $55 billion in the second quarter alone.

We’ve contacted Amazon to find out what’s happening. Stay tuned for updates.

Updated at 6:55 p.m. to clarify that the outage is ongoing for many users.