Amazon restores service after global outage, spokesman says 'everything running smoothly'

E-commerce website Amazon on July 12 said that its online store had returned to normal services after a global outage disrupted shopping on its country sites. According to the outage monitoring website Downdetector, services were disrupted for nearly two hours. They occurred on Sunday evening in the United States and Monday morning for much of the rest of the world. The reason behind the outage is still unclear, however, an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the temporary issues have been resolved and everything is now running smoothly. 

It is worth mentioning that this is was the second broad disruption since late June when users experienced a brief outage on Amazon platforms including Alexa and Prime Video before services were restored. On July 11, the interruption was observed on a global scale, including India, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Singapore. Downdetector received over 38,000 reports which indicated issues with Amazon's site. Additionally, 500 users also reported issues with Amazon Web Services and the issues ranged from Amazon not working to Amazon not loading. 

Over 700 Indians affected by global outage  

About 79 per cent of problems were about the website, 16 per cent of problems were about log-in and 5 per cent were about the check-out procedure. The outage monitor also received 720 reports from India, the number peaking around 08:45am IST on July 12, 2021. About 65 per cent of reports were regarding the website, 23 per cent were regarding issues with log-in and the remaining 12 per cent were about the checking-out procedure.

The problems that users had to face during the outage range from Amazon India not loading to selected items not showing on the website. Users also reported a search loop issue, wherein those who were searching anything from the search bar were being redirected to the main page. Some users also reported issues in the checking-out process.

The Amazon down incident was also reported via the popular social media platform Twitter. Shoppers took to social media to report this, stating that they have tried accessing several other product pages, with all of them returning the same error.

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