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Amazon outage complaints spike as site goes down

Tens of thousands of users couldn't access the shopping site.

Corinne Reichert Senior Editor
Corinne Reichert (she/her) grew up in Sydney, Australia and moved to California in 2019. She holds degrees in law and communications, and currently writes news, analysis and features for CNET across the topics of electric vehicles, broadband networks, mobile devices, big tech, artificial intelligence, home technology and entertainment. In her spare time, she watches soccer games and F1 races, and goes to Disneyland as often as possible.
Expertise News, mobile, broadband, 5G, home tech, streaming services, entertainment, AI, policy, business, politics Credentials
  • I've been covering technology and mobile for 12 years, first as a telecommunications reporter and assistant editor at ZDNet in Australia, then as CNET's West Coast head of breaking news, and now in the Thought Leadership team.
Corinne Reichert
Amazon outage

Amazon went down Thursday.

Screenshot by CNET

Amazon has recovered from its outage Thursday afternoon, after the site wouldn't load for tens of thousands of users. Both desktop and mobile users were being served "this site can't be reached" or "something went wrong on our end" messages when attempting to load Amazon.

Complaints spiked to more than 53,000 at around 12 p.m. PT on Down Detector. Users complained on Twitter or said 2020 is clearly the end of the world -- although some suggested it's now a chance to "take a break from buying things and call your family to see how they're doing."

As of around 12:45 p.m., the site started coming back up, according to one outage tracking website. Amazon confirmed in an emailed statement at 1:20 p.m. that it was back up and running.

"Some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping, however it has now been resolved," a spokesperson said.