Last night, there was an Amazon search outage on the Amazon.com marketplace. The entire site structure was there but search results, although displaying how many matching products were found, didn’t actually display any products.
Users took to twitter and DownDetector and it would appear that the Amazon search outage lasted from about 9pm to 11pm UK time which would have been early afternoon for most of the US. Consumers would still have been able to purchase, but only if they already knew the exact URL of the product they were looking for.
It's not just you, Amazon search appears to be down.https://t.co/HNH9E3LemB
— CNET (@CNET) September 5, 2018
CNET reports that the outage wasn’t limited to desktops, but impacted mobile browsers and the Amazon mobile app as well.
Amazon outages are relatively rare occurrences however, it’s somewhat surprising that Amazon made no public acknowledgement of the outage on either their regular twitter accounts or on their AWS status page. The only mention is one CNET found from Amazon Japan who acknowledged that search was down and said that Amazon were working to recover.
It’s hard to assess the cost of the Amazon search outage to Amazon themselves or to merchants. If you sell on Amazon.com did you notice lower sales yesterday? It is of course possible that customers who would have purchased during to two hour outage simply came back later in the day to buy and the impact in that case would be almost impossible to measure.
One Response
In the last couple of days I have noticed a few problems with Amazon, last night my sales for the day were showing as zero, even though they had showed earlier and several times, in the last few days I have landed on blank pages, including when trying to withdraw money. These were soon rectified and I did not give them much more thought.