For about one hour on Wednesday morning, thousands of Amazon.com Inc. shoppers received error messages during checkout.
Amazon’s message for shoppers using its app or website said the merchant was experiencing “unusually heavy traffic.”
Some Amazon sellers said they noticed an impact during the outage.
“Sales just nosedived” for part of the morning, said Ethan Goldstein, CEO of Curist, an Amazon marketplace merchant and seller of online medicine.
Curist Relief comparison of daily units ordered by hour. The red line represents units ordered on Amazon.com on Dec. 6. The blue line indicates sales for Dec. 7 during the outage.
Goldstein said on Dec. 7, from 9 a.m. ET, the number of orders decreased 95% compared with yesterday. Through 10 a.m. ET, the number of orders decreased 34% compared with the same period on Dec. 6.
“That includes some of the early morning where everything was fine,” he said.
According to Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, problems peaked at about 9:07 a.m. ET, affecting customers throughout the U.S. and worldwide. Shoppers received error messages and could not complete checkout.
Beyond Amazon’s reference to heavy traffic, the reason for the outage is unclear. When reached for comment, Amazon spokesperson Betsy Harden said at 10:20 a.m. ET, “We’re sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues while shopping. We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issue.”
By 11:44 a.m. ET, Amazon shared, “We have resolved the issue, and everything is now running smoothly.”
Amazon.com’s outage comes two days after Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage on Dec. 5.
Reasons for Amazon outage unknown
Sellers experienced difficult accessing the site early Dec. 7, said Fahim Naim, head of Amazon at Advantage Unified Commerce, an ecommerce consulting agency. But, the actual impact remains to be seen.
“What we can’t tell is if the drop in hourly sales per the reporting is real and due to customers not being able to access the site, or if it’s another data issue,” Naim said. “Across accounts, we see a huge dip in reported sales by hour between 7 a.m.-10 a.m. ET, but I am not clear if that is a reporting issue due to AWS also having issues this morning — or if that is real.”
Shoppers took to Twitter to voice their frustration. One Twitter user posted, “It would be nice if Amazon would admit there’s a problem. Going on half an hour now.”
Web performance vendor Blue Triangle said while it didn’t see the Amazon outage, it did notice issues around the same time as the Amazon outage for other clients the company monitors.
Blue Triangle bases its website performance ranking on metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures the time a website takes to show a user the largest content on the screen, complete and ready for interaction.
Amazon is No. 1 in the 2022 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 database. The Top 1000 ranks North American web merchants by web sales. It is No. 3 in the Digital Commerce 360 Online Marketplaces database, which ranks the 100 largest global marketplaces.
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