Amazon recovers from outage: AWS denies any service disruption

Amazon’s bad luck streak continues, as thousands of users reported on Wednesday that the e-commerce website was down, preventing them from making purchases.

With the issue now resolved, according to the internet outage tracking site Downdetector.com, the website disruption began to impact users in the United States at exactly 6:29 p.m. Eastern Time.

Barely 10 minutes later, reports on Downdetector showed 6,414 users were having problems with the website and some with the mobile app.

According to the site's breakdown, 51% of users said they had problems checking out on Amazon while another 40% identified issues with the Amazon shopping cart.

Around the same time, Downdetector had also reported that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was down, although barely 200 reports had come in, and soon after, an AWS spokesperson confirmed to Reuters that "AWS services are operating normally."

This was also confirmed by Anna Belcher, who reached out to Cybernews on behalf of AWS, “AWS services operated normally.”

She called Downdetector a “unreliable source” and claims that “the only resource on the internet that provides accurate data on the availability of AWS services is the AWS Health Dashboard.”

Still, more than 1,200 people took to the internet watch site to comment about the Amazon.com outage, many of them complaining about the interruption to their holiday shopping.

"Yep, I can’t check out, it’s 6:57 p.m. This has been going on for about an hour or so. Lame," one user posted. "FIX THIS AMAZON.....I was going to order my Christmas tree, but I can't because the checkout is down," another wrote.

Other users took to social media site X to find out what was happening with the online shopping behemoth.

Can’t place an order. Keep getting that error screen with pics of random dogs. 😂

undefined Zen Lotus Arts (@ZenLotusArts) November 5, 2025

Although the outage turned out to be short-lived, it's no wonder Amazon users were expecting the worst.

Barely two weeks ago, on Sunday evening, October 20th, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unexpectedly went down, impacting millions of internet users across the globe, until the following evening.

From airlines to banking to everyday apps, over 1,000 companies were affected, including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, and Venmo, as well as Coinbase, Amazon Alexa, MyFitnessPal, and Microsoft Office and Teams, which depend on the cloud service provider to run their applications, software, and store data.

Amazon stated that the outage, which occurred at one of its primary data centers located in Northern Virginia, was caused by Domain Name Server (DNS) resolution failures.

DNS, often called the internet’s “phone book,” takes a "human-readable" domain name, such as cybernews.com, and translates it into a "machine-readable" IP address that computers use to locate and communicate with each other. If this translation fails, the device can’t find the server hosting the website, and the user won’t be able to connect to that website address.