Doggone it, Amazon had some problems on Thursday. Amazon/CNET
If you tried to indulge in some retail therapy on Thursday, you may have had trouble accessing Amazon. As of 5:10 p.m. PT, the outage was fully resolved, an Amazon spokesperson said. CNET staffers who had trouble using the site earlier on Thursday were able to complete purchases by 3 p.m. PT.
"We're sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping," an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. "We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and [the] website and app are now running smoothly."
Amazon Web Services continued to function normally on Thursday, the spokesperson said. AWS provides the foundational cloud infrastructure that enables the retail behemoth to operate, scale and deliver its e-commerce services globally. When it goes down, it's often huge news, as in an October outage that affected thousands of other companies, including Roblox, Reddit and Venmo.
According to DownDetector, which is owned by CNET parent company Ziff Davis, checkout issues were the most reported problem on Thursday, with 38% of reports, followed by mobile app reports at 18%. Product page errors resulted in 13% of reports.
Error reports at DownDetector peaked at 21,754 on Thursday, but at 5 p.m. PT, they were down to around 800.
DownDetector reports that no specific connectivity provider stood out from the report data, pointing to the disruption not being limited to any particular network.
The Amazon Help account on X posted a message about the outage.
"We're sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues," the message read. "We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issue."
Ziff Davis announced this week that it is selling DownDetector and its other Connectivity brands to Accenture, but the deal hasn't yet closed.