It started with a spinning wheel. Then an error message. Then the creeping realization that it was not just you — Amazon was down, and tens of thousands of shoppers were stuck right along with you.
On Thursday, March 5, a widespread outage hit Amazon’s platform, sending user-reported problems surging past 23,000 within hours. The failure struck at the worst possible point — checkout — leaving shoppers unable to complete purchases, process payments, or even confirm their orders. What began as a spike in complaints quickly evolved into one of the most visible tech disruptions of the year so far.
Amazon’s Outage by the Numbers
The trouble did not drop all at once. Outage tracking service Downdetector began logging a sharp rise in reports around 2:09 p.m. ET, and the numbers climbed steadily from there in waves — a pattern that pointed to sustained platform strain rather than a quick, isolated glitch.
Here is how the problem count escalated throughout Thursday afternoon:
- More than 2,000 reports were logged in the first documented snapshot at 2:09 p.m. ET
- The count climbed past 5,000 as the afternoon pushed forward
- Reports rose beyond 9,000 with no resolution in sight
- The tally crossed 13,000 with additional spikes appearing across other Amazon services
- The final reported count surpassed 23,000 issues with the online store
Checkout failures accounted for 55% of all complaints, making it the single biggest pain point of the outage. Product page errors and mobile app failures made up roughly one-third of remaining reports. Downdetector’s outage map flagged hotspots in major U.S. cities including New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.
More Than Just a Shopping Problem
What elevated Thursday’s outage beyond a routine storefront hiccup was its reach across multiple parts of the Amazon ecosystem. As reports surged into the tens of thousands, Downdetector also logged spikes for Amazon Web Services and Prime Video — two entirely separate but deeply interconnected pillars of the company’s operation.
Amazon Web Services powers a significant portion of the internet’s infrastructure, meaning disruptions there can cascade far beyond Amazon’s own retail platform. The Prime Video spike, while less financially urgent for most shoppers, added another front to what had become a multi-system failure.
Fresh and Whole Foods ordering were also affected, leaving customers unable to place grocery delivery or pickup orders. For shoppers dealing with time-sensitive needs, the outage created real and immediate problems beyond a delayed package.
What Happened Days Before the Crash
The timing raised eyebrows. On Monday, March 2, three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East were damaged during Iranian drone strikes targeting infrastructure in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Amazon did not confirm any direct link between those strikes and Thursday’s outage, but the proximity of the two events did not go unnoticed.
No official root cause has been released, and Amazon‘s public response remained limited during the height of the disruption.
What Shoppers Can Do Right Now
If your order did not go through Thursday, a few practical steps can help minimize the frustration:
- Keep items in your cart rather than clearing them — pricing and availability can shift during high-traffic recovery windows
- Retry checkout later rather than repeatedly attempting during peak disruption periods
- Monitor Amazon’s official service health page for restoration updates rather than relying solely on third-party trackers
- For time-sensitive orders, consider a backup option until the platform fully stabilizes
Outages of this scale tend to resolve on their own, but restoration can create its own bottlenecks as a backlog of stalled orders attempts to process at once. Patience, for now, is the most practical tool available.
The situation remains ongoing. Amazon has not released an official statement on the root cause or a confirmed resolution timeline as of publication.
