As millions of Americans prepared to witness a total solar eclipse, Amazon.com Inc. sent a safety warning to consumers who'd purchased potentially hazardous safety glasses and camera filters to capture the spectacle in the sky.

“We recommend that you DO NOT use this product to view the sun or the eclipse,” Amazon wrote in emails to consumers, according to published reports.

Amazon is now the target of a class action in Charleston, South Carolina, federal district court, where five law firms teamed up to sue the online retail giant over its alleged inadequate recall notification before the Aug. 21 eclipse. In the lawsuit, lawyers argue Amazon's recall effort was “tragically too little, too late” and claim that the lead plaintiffs—Corey Payne and his fiancé, Kayla Harris—did not receive the email notice.

“Notwithstanding Amazon's woefully inadequate email notification, any and all users of eclipse glasses were subjected to unreasonable and foreseeable risks of severe and permanent eye injury due to the negligence of Amazon,” the complaint said.

The lawsuit notes that eclipse glasses were often sold in packs of three and 20 and then “distributed to individuals, who never received a warning email.”

After viewing the eclipse, Payne and Harris claim they began experiencing “pain and discomfort, headaches, eye watering and other symptoms,” according to the lawsuit. The two also “began to see dark spots in their line of vision, suffered vision impairment, including blurriness, a central blind spot, increased sensitivity, changes in perception of color and distorted vision,” according to the lawsuit.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs, James Ward Jr. of McGowan, Hood & Felder in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, raises questions about how companies should respond when they learn about or are made aware of a potential product-safety problem.

Amazon, which reportedly did not manufacture the glasses in question, declined to comment on whether it had contacted any government agency as part of its recall. It's unclear which agency, if any, would have been a part of such a recall.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which conducts recalls with companies and penalizes those manufacturers that fail to immediately report potential hazards, said the eclipse glasses fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. A spokeswoman for the FDA—which oversees recalls of medical devices such as sunglasses—said the agency has not “cleared or approved any product for this purpose nor issued guidance on solar eclipse glasses.”

The FDA spokeswoman noted in an email that the International Organization for Standardization has recommended specifications for eclipse glasses.

In the buildup to the total eclipse, NASA and the American Astronomical Society urged viewers to only use glasses engineered by reputable vendors and carrying the international safety standard number “ISO 12312-2.”

Amazon, in its alert to consumers, said it was unable to confirm that some of the protective shades sold on its site were made by reputable manufacturers. The company reached that conclusion after reviewing suppliers “out of an abundance of caution,” an Amazon spokesperson told PBS, for a story that was cited in the lawsuit filed this week.

But Amazon has not publicly disclosed the list of vendors it found unreliable.

C. Ryan Barber, based in Washington, covers government affairs and regulatory compliance. Contact him at [email protected]. On Twitter: @cryanbarber.