Amazon's costly glitch sparks chaos across US: Here's what we know

Thousands of customers reported Amazon services outages on Thursday, March 5, 2026.

According to Downdetector, a website that tracks the outages of multiple online companies, 20,804 outage reports were received by Amazon customers as till 3:30 p.m.

The portal, however, added that half of these issues were reported to have occurred during the checkout process.

The outages peaked around 2 p.m. ET, with over 21,000 users reporting issues two hours later, as reported by Downdetector.

However, the issues seem to be fixed by 8 p.m. ET.

Amazon stated the reason behind the massive outage as a simple code update.

The statement released by the company spokesperson read, “We’re sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping.”

Updating on the crash, the statement added, “We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and the website and app are now running smoothly.”

In addition, the users have also reported issues placing orders or viewing their purchase history with Amazon Fresh, the company’s grocery delivery service.

While providing the latest update, Amazon said on Thursday, March 6, that its cloud services were functioning normally.

For context, the outages were the result of drone strikes that damaged three of its data centers, the company’s cloud computing unit, which is located in the UAE and Bahrain.

Iranian state media revealed on Wednesday, March 4, that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted the Amazon’s data center in Bahrain for the company’s support of "U.S. military and intelligence activities.”

The company’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, in a statement on Monday, March 2, had confirmed the attack on one of its facilities in Bahrain that was targeted in a drone strike on Sunday, March 1, 2026.