Amazon is back up after outage affecting tens of thousands of shoppers

• Amazon faced an outage affecting tens of thousands of shoppers globally on Thursday afternoon.
• Downdetector reported a surge in complaints of Amazon issues, peaking at 20,000 by 3:49 p.m. ET.
• Amazon's outage involved checkout and pricing errors, caused by a software code deployment.

Amazon experienced an outage on Thursday that lasted into the evening, and tens of thousands of shoppers said they had trouble accessing Amazon's services.

According to outage tracker Downdetector, reports of issues surged Thursday afternoon, reaching about 20,000 by 3:49 p.m. ET on March 5. Complaints first spiked around 2:30 p.m., when roughly 18,000 users reported problems. The number briefly dipped to around 16,000 before climbing again.

Users on Downdetector said the problems ranged from checkout and payment failures to incorrect or fluctuating prices appearing on product listings.

"We're sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues while shopping," Amazon said in an earlier statement to Business Insider. "We appreciate customers' patience as we work to resolve the issue."

The outage does not appear to be related to Amazon Web Services. When AWS experienced an outage in October 2025, it knocked out a slew of other apps that rely on the cloud service, including Wordle, Slack, Snapchat, and Reddit.

That outage was attributed to a DNS error in Amazon's Virginia data center.

As of 8 p.m. ET, Amazon's issue appears to be resolved, and Downdetector is no longer receiving a high number of outage reports.

"We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and website and app are now running smoothly," said Amazon in its latest statement to Business Insider.