If you’re shopping online, or just trying to access certain websites, and things aren’t loading properly, it’s (probably) not your internet: Amazon is down. As of Thursday afternoon, Amazon services, including both Amazon.com and AWS, are having issues loading and running.
You can see that from Downdetector , a site used to track user reports of issues with websites and services. (Disclosure: Lifehacker’s parent company, Ziff Davis, owns Downdetector.) As of this article, Amazon.com has tens of thousands of user reports , while AWS has thousands . Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service, also has user reports at this time , though they aren’t as drastic.
It’s not clear what’s causing the issues just yet, but it’s not the first time Amazon has made headlines for outages. Back in October, AWS had a major period of downtime , taking down much of the internet. Many sites and services rely on AWS to operate, so when Amazon has issues, all of these companies have issues too.
I’m sure we’ll learn what the issue is in due time, and Amazon will undoubtedly issue a fix soon after. But it goes to show that even the largest companies in the world aren’t immune to problems. And when those problems do arise, it affects a lot of users.
