Amazon shopping site back online after short interruption
The issue with the checkout page frustrated both shoppers and sellers
For around one hour on Wednesday morning, thousands of Amazon shoppers received error messages on the e-commerce site's checkout page.
Downdetector, which analyses outages by compiling status updates from a variety of sources, showed over 12,000 users in the United States reporting difficulties accessing the e-commerce website. The problem with checking out on the website was the most-commonly reported issue by users.
Customers in the United States and throughout the globe were affected by problem that peaked at about 9:07 a.m. Eastern Time, according to DownDetector.
The affected customers saw the following the error message:
'An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we're working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed. We apologize for the inconvenience.'
Such an issue is unusual for Amazon, a site that became even more of a shopping resource for countless homes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Patience with suboptimal shopping experiences isn't what it used to be and naturally, many users took to social media to complain that the site was not working for them.
"It would be nice if .@amazon would admit there's a problem," one user said.
Some people also reported issues with AWS, but Downdetector showed such complaints were fewer than 300.
A number of Amazon sellers felt the impact of the outage on their sales.
Ethan Goldstein, CEO of Curist, an online pharmacy and vendor on the Amazon marketplace, said "sales just nosedived" for part of the morning. The problem seemed to persist for more than an hour before being fully resolved.
"We're sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping. We have resolved the issue," a company spokesperson told Reuters, without providing any details on what caused the issue.
This was not the first instance of an outage impacting Amazon services during the festive season.
In December last year, a major network outage hit AWS, knocking out websites, apps and streaming platforms worldwide.
The outage also affected internal tools at the company, including the Flex and AtoZ apps that are used by warehouse and delivery workers, making it impossible for them to scan packages or access delivery routes.
Amazon's e-commerce website and its Prime Video service went down for thousands of users as a result of the outage, as did Disney+, Netflix, Ticketmaster, Slack, Coinbase, and stock trading app Robinhood.
In November 2020, a multi-hour outage affected one of AWS's 23 global regions (US-East-1), impacting many services and sites, including Coinbase, Flickr, Glassdoor and Roku, as well as news services like The Washington Post, Tampa Bay Times and Philadelphia Inquirer.