A widespread outage on Thursday temporarily crippled Amazon’s services, leaving thousands of customers unable to complete purchases. The disruption, which began around 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT, affected both the website and mobile app, though the scale and cause remain unclear.
Widespread Reports of Errors
Within 15 minutes, outage tracker Downdetector registered nearly 160,000 error reports, with checkout problems accounting for the largest share (38 percent). This suggests a core issue within Amazon’s purchasing infrastructure. While reports initially spiked sharply, they began to subside after roughly two hours, with some users confirming service restoration.
Official Response and Speculation
Amazon’s customer service acknowledged the issues on X (formerly Twitter), stating, “We’re sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues… We appreciate your patience.” The company has not yet publicly explained the cause of the outage. Online speculation initially linked the disruption to recent Iranian drone strikes against Amazon data centers in the Middle East, but those attacks were limited to regional operations and are likely unrelated to the U.S. outage.
The Bigger Picture
This incident highlights the critical dependence of modern commerce on a handful of tech giants. Amazon handles an enormous volume of online transactions, and even a brief outage can ripple through the economy. The fact that the service returned within hours suggests the problem was contained, but also underscores how fragile this infrastructure can be.
The outage also raises questions about redundancy and disaster recovery in large-scale digital systems. If Amazon’s infrastructure is vulnerable to disruption, it suggests other major platforms may face similar risks.
As of this writing, Amazon’s website appears functional in the U.S. and Australia, though scattered reports of ongoing issues persist. The incident serves as a reminder that even the most dominant companies are not immune to technical failures.
