A weird Amazon.com outage left shoppers with no search results
It's not just you -- Amazon.com search appeared to be down today.
For at least a couple hours, Amazon shoppers couldn't search for anything they wanted to buy.
No search results. Not on desktop, not on mobile, and not in the Amazon.com app either. We just saw ads -- and so did the thousands of people reporting the same thing on social media, according to DownDetector, beginning around noon PT.
We were still able to add items to our cart and (presumably) buy them, using a direct URL or if we already had them saved. But searching for all the wonderful things on Amazon that we really don't need and probably shouldn't buy and... wait, is this a good thing?
Amazon's AWS status page was totally lit up green, showing no errors there. The official @AmazonHelp account on Twitter didn't issue a single response in English about this issue, but it has responded to a couple of customers in Japanese:
According to a rough Microsoft translation, the important part there is "It is not possible to search on the site now, we are working to recover."
Amazon's infamous Prime Day outage earlier this year also started around noon PT, but that could be a coincidence.
Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Originally published 1:50 p.m. PT.
Update, 3:37p.m. PT: We still haven't heard back from Amazon, but the site appears to be working for us again.