Tech

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

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Amazon is facing an outage, affecting tens of thousands of shoppers globally who are experiencing issues with checkout and payment. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
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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.

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Katherine Li, West Coast breaking news reporter at the Business Insider.
Katherine Li
Katherine Li is a reporter on Business Insider's West Coast business news team. She covers career,  the future of work, and how AI is changing hiring practices and workplace trends.Previously, she was a newsroom fellow who wrote international breaking news and produced newsletters for Semafor. Before that, she wrote about climate policies for The Lever, covered the AAPI community for the SF Chronicle as a freelancer, and wrote about the 2019 Hong Kong protests as an intern for The New York Times.She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and a graduate of the international journalism program at Hong Kong Baptist University with minors in French and English literature.  Email Katherine at katherineli@insider.com and follow her on Bluesky @katherineli.bsky.social