Amazon went down Thursday afternoon and tens of thousands of users across the United States are reporting that they cannot check out, cannot see prices, cannot log in, and cannot complete purchases.
The outage started being reported just before 2 p.m. ET and has been climbing steadily ever since.
If you tried to buy something on Amazon today and hit a wall, you are not alone. More than 23,000 users have submitted outage reports to Downdetector as of this writing, and the number is still moving.
What Is Happening With Amazon Right Now
The problems are widespread and touching multiple parts of the platform simultaneously. According to outage reports and user complaints flooding social media, Amazon shoppers are experiencing checkout and payment failures, missing prices on product listings, inability to log in or stay logged in, product pages failing to load correctly, and items incorrectly showing as unavailable.
The checkout process is the most reported failure point, accounting for more than half of all submitted complaints.
Users attempting to finalize purchases are being greeted by Amazon’s error page, the one featuring the company’s dogs, with no way to proceed and no explanation for what went wrong.
Prices are also behaving strangely for many users. Multiple shoppers report that prices are not appearing on product listings at all, with some items showing no price until added to the cart.
Others report prices appearing to shift or change during the checkout process before the page breaks entirely.
Amazon’s familiar “Today’s Deals” section is also affected. Users report that clicking through only loads a handful of items where there are normally dozens.
Is Amazon Web Services And Prime Video Also Down?
This is not just a retail problem. As the report count climbed into the tens of thousands, outage trackers began logging spikes across other parts of the Amazon ecosystem, including Amazon Web Services and Prime Video.
That matters beyond shopping. Amazon Web Services is one of the most widely used cloud computing platforms in the world, powering thousands of businesses, apps, and services that have nothing to do with buying anything on Amazon.com.
When AWS is affected, the downstream impact reaches far beyond what any individual shopper experiences trying to buy shoes or electronics.
Prime Video users are also reporting issues, adding a third front to what has become a multi-system outage event.
What Has Amazon Said About The Outage?
Very little. Amazon’s official Help account on X has been responding to affected users with a statement that offers no specifics and no timeline.
“We’re sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues while shopping. We appreciate customers’ patience as we work to resolve the issue,” the account posted.
A separate response from the account used nearly identical language: “Hello. We’re sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues. We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issue.”
No root cause has been provided. No estimated resolution time has been given.
Amazon has not released an official statement explaining what triggered the outage or how widespread the internal assessment of the problem actually is.
What Is The Connection To The AWS Middle East Outage?
Earlier this week, on Monday, three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East were damaged during Iranian drone strikes in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
The incidents caused disruption to AWS infrastructure in that region.
Amazon has not said there is any direct connection between those strikes and today’s outage in the United States.
The company has not confirmed a correlation and has not provided any information linking the two events.
However, the timing has not gone unnoticed. Monday’s infrastructure damage and Thursday’s major US-facing outage occurring within days of each other is something users and observers are pointing to, even without an official explanation connecting them.
What is known is that today’s outage is affecting users specifically in the United States, with Downdetector’s outage map showing hotspots concentrated in major cities including New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.
How Long Has Amazon Been Down And When Will It Be Fixed?
Reports first began rising around 2:10 p.m. ET. The count climbed past 5,000, then 9,000, then 13,000, and has now surpassed 23,000 with no clear sign of resolution at the time of publishing.
Based on historical outage data, Amazon incidents typically resolve within a few hours.
In the last 90 days, Amazon has had three tracked incidents with a median resolution time of approximately four and a half hours.
Multi-system outages affecting both the retail platform and cloud infrastructure can take longer to diagnose and resolve, particularly when the root cause has not been publicly identified.
The practical advice for anyone affected right now is to wait and try again later. There is nothing on the user end that can fix this. The issue is on Amazon’s side, and the platform will restore service when the internal team has addressed whatever triggered the failure.
What To Do If Amazon Is Down For You Right Now
If you are trying to complete a purchase and hitting the error page, do not keep attempting the transaction repeatedly.
In some cases repeated checkout attempts during an outage can result in duplicate charge attempts that need to be manually resolved later, even if none of them completed successfully.
Check your email for any order confirmation.
If you received one, your order went through before the outage hit. If you received nothing, the purchase did not complete and you will need to try again once service is restored.
For anything urgent, competing retailers including Walmart, Target, and Best Buy are fully operational.
For AWS-dependent services experiencing issues, this is an infrastructure-level problem and affected businesses should monitor Amazon’s official AWS status page for updates on restoration timelines by service and region.
This story is still developing. Amazon has not yet explained what caused the outage, and the report count continues to rise.
