Amazon Web Services Hit By Outage, Thousands Report Disruptions
Users reported about 6,630 reports of outages affecting the e-commerce platform to the outage tracking website.
Amazon.com Inc.'s AWS experienced a widespread service disruption on Wednesday, affecting thousands of users across the United States. The outage affected core e-commerce functions, leaving shoppers unable to complete purchases just weeks before the holiday season.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector, reports surged shortly after 6:30 pm ET. Users reported about 6,630 outages affecting the e-commerce platform to the outage-tracking website.
The common incidents that were related to the checkout process and the functionality of their shopping carts.
Affected metropolitan areas included major hubs such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit.
The incident caused immediate frustration among users, many of whom took to social media platforms to voice complaints about interrupted orders and error screens.
While Amazon’s main retail site was impacted, the company’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), appeared to experience only limited issues, according to a Reuters report citing an AWS spokesperson who stated, "AWS services are operating normally," suggesting the problem was only related to the consumer-facing e-commerce platform, not the massive infrastructure that powers thousands of other internet services.
The disruption comes on the heels of a much larger AWS outage in October, which crippled hundreds of sites globally, throwing light on the internet’s reliance on centralised cloud providers.
Amazon has yet to issue an official statement regarding the cause of Wednesday's malfunction.
AWS October 2025 Outage
The October 2025 outage of the cloud service lasted a significant 15 hours, severely disrupting the operations of hundreds of client companies, including Apple and Epic Games. Experts and analysts labeled it Amazon's worst outage since 2021.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana told Reuters at the time that the incident would "likely fuel customers wanting to spread their infrastructure between multiple clouds, which could be a positive for smaller vendors like Google."
