Amazon Crashes Hard: 23,000+ Users Report Outage Hitting Checkout, AWS, and Prime Video

RochesterFirst, Rolling Out, and GVWire all report that:

1. On March 5, 2026, Amazon suffered a major outage peaking at over 23,000 user-reported problems on DownDetector, with reports beginning at 11:09 a.m. ET and surging through the afternoon.
2. The disruption hit Amazon's checkout process hardest — accounting for 58% of complaints — but also spread to product pages, the mobile app, Amazon Fresh, Prime Video, and Amazon Web Services, with outage hotspots confirmed across New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other major U.S. cities.
3. Amazon issued only a brief holding statement — "We're sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues while shopping" — and offered no root cause explanation, even as questions swirled about Iranian drone strikes that had damaged three AWS data center facilities in Bahrain and the UAE just days earlier on March 1–2; Amazon denied any direct link.

Social media erupted almost instantly, with users venting frustration over abandoned carts and failed Prime Video streams. The timing raised eyebrows given the Middle East infrastructure damage, but Amazon stayed tight-lipped. Analysts noted the outage underscored the fragility of centralized e-commerce infrastructure — and the very bad luck of going down on an ordinary Thursday afternoon with no explanation to offer millions of paying customers.