Amazon Website Outage Disrupts Thousands of U.S. Shoppers Before Services Recover

Amazon’s e-commerce platform experienced a significant outage on Thursday that temporarily disrupted online shopping for tens of thousands of users across the United States. According to Downdetector, a website that tracks service interruptions based on user reports, the problem began around 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time and quickly escalated as shoppers encountered various technical issues.

At the height of the disruption, more than 22,700 users reported problems accessing Amazon’s website and mobile app. Many customers took to social media to describe checkout failures, sudden price changes, app crashes, and difficulties accessing product pages or viewing their order history. These widespread reports suggested that key functions of Amazon’s online marketplace were temporarily unavailable.

By 6:13 p.m. ET, the number of reported incidents had dropped significantly to fewer than 1,700, indicating that the company had largely restored its services. However, Downdetector noted that its data is based on user-submitted reports, meaning the actual number of affected customers may have been higher.

Amazon acknowledged the issue earlier in the day and said it was actively working to fix the disruption. In a statement, a company spokesperson apologized to customers experiencing difficulties while shopping online and thanked users for their patience as technical teams addressed the problem.

While the exact cause of the outage has not yet been confirmed, reports also indicated minor service interruptions affecting Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Web Services (AWS). These disruptions raised concerns about broader infrastructure problems within the company’s digital ecosystem.

The incident follows a major Amazon outage in October 2025 that caused widespread global disruption. That earlier event impacted thousands of applications, payment platforms, and workplace systems that rely on AWS, leaving many services offline for several hours.

Adding to the week’s challenges, Amazon’s cloud operations were also affected after drone strikes damaged several data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain amid ongoing regional conflict. The damage briefly disrupted parts of the company’s cloud computing network.

Although Thursday’s outage was largely resolved within a few hours, the incident highlights the growing reliance on Amazon’s online marketplace and cloud infrastructure. Any disruption to these services can quickly affect millions of users, businesses, and digital platforms that depend on the company’s technology.