Amazon.com was briefly down for many in the US
Amazon.com was down for many people in the US for a short while Thursday afternoon. A number of Verge staffers were unable to access the site, and countless user reports of an outage across the country poured in on Downdetector.
“Some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping, however it has now been resolved,” Amazon said in a statement to The Verge.
It’s unclear how widespread the problems were
It’s exceedingly rare for Amazon’s main e-commerce site to have an outage that was as extensive as today’s, but it’s not unprecedented for Amazon’s internet services to go down. In 2017, Amazon’s widely used cloud computing division, AWS, had an outage that took down many other services and websites that relied on it.
It’s unclear exactly how widespread the outage was or how much it may have affected Amazon’s other products and services, but some users did report problems with AWS and Prime Video on Downdetector at around the same time Amazon.com was experiencing issues.
Update, May 28th, 4:18PM ET: Added statement from Amazon.
