Is Amazon Down? How to Check and What to Do

You are trying to place an order on Amazon and the page will not load. Or maybe your app relies on AWS and everything just stopped working. The first thing you need to know is whether the problem is on Amazon's end or yours.

This guide covers how to check if Amazon is down, what typically causes Amazon outages, and what you can do while you wait for things to come back online.

How to Check if Amazon Is Down

Amazon is really two things: the retail shopping site (amazon.com) and the cloud platform (Amazon Web Services). They run on separate infrastructure, so one can be down while the other works fine. The steps for checking each are a bit different.

Check the AWS Service Health Dashboard

If you depend on AWS for hosting, storage, databases, or any cloud services, the official health dashboard is your first stop.

The dashboard breaks down status by service and region. If you are running workloads in us-east-1, you can check that specific region rather than guessing. Look for yellow or red indicators. AWS also posts detailed incident updates here during active outages.

One thing to know: AWS can be slow to update this page during the early minutes of an outage. If you are seeing problems but the dashboard shows green, give it a few minutes and check again.

Check Amazon Retail

Amazon's shopping site does not have a public status page. There is no equivalent of the AWS health dashboard for the retail side. That makes checking a bit more manual.

Start by visiting amazon.com directly. If the site loads but certain features are broken (search not returning results, cart not updating, checkout failing), it could be a partial outage. If the site does not load at all, that is a stronger signal.

Use Third-Party Outage Trackers

Sites like Downdetector aggregate user reports to show whether a service is experiencing widespread issues. Search for "Amazon" on Downdetector and look at the report graph. A spike in reports within the last 30 minutes is a strong indicator that something is wrong.

Downdetector tracks both Amazon shopping and AWS separately, so make sure you are looking at the right page for your situation.

Check Social Media

Search Twitter/X for "amazon down" or "AWS down." During a real outage, you will see dozens or hundreds of posts within minutes. Reddit's r/aws subreddit is another good source for AWS-specific issues, especially for getting technical details about which services are affected.

Use Is That Down

Is That Down monitors vendor status pages automatically and can alert you the moment AWS reports an issue. If you rely on AWS or other cloud services for your business, setting up automated monitoring saves you from having to manually check during every suspicious slowdown. For a full walkthrough on checking service status, see our guide on how to check if a service is down.

Common Causes of Amazon Outages

Amazon and AWS outages are relatively rare given the scale of their infrastructure, but they do happen. Here are the most common causes.

Infrastructure Failures

AWS operates data centers across dozens of regions worldwide. Hardware failures, power issues, or cooling problems at a single data center can take down services in that region. Most major AWS outages have involved infrastructure problems in a specific availability zone rather than a global failure.

Configuration and Deployment Errors

Some of AWS's most notable outages were caused by internal configuration mistakes. A single bad command or misconfigured deployment can cascade through dependent services. The famous 2017 S3 outage in us-east-1, which took down a significant portion of the internet, was traced back to a command that accidentally removed more servers than intended.

Network Issues

Connectivity problems between AWS regions, between AWS and the public internet, or within Amazon's internal network can cause partial or complete outages. These issues sometimes affect specific geographic areas rather than all users.

Capacity Overload

During peak events like Prime Day or Black Friday, Amazon's retail site occasionally experiences slowdowns or errors from the sheer volume of traffic. AWS services can also hit capacity limits in popular regions during demand spikes.

Third-Party Dependencies

Even Amazon depends on external providers for some things. DNS issues, certificate authority problems, or upstream network provider outages can affect Amazon services indirectly.

What to Do When Amazon Is Down

Your response depends on whether you are dealing with a retail outage or an AWS outage.

If Amazon Shopping Is Down

The practical options are limited. You cannot fix Amazon's retail infrastructure. Here is what you can do:

Wait it out. Amazon retail outages are typically resolved within minutes to a couple of hours. Save your cart items or take a screenshot so you do not lose track of what you were ordering.

Try the Amazon app. Sometimes the mobile app works when the website does not (or vice versa), because they use different front-end infrastructure.

Use an alternative. If you need to buy something urgently, check other retailers. For digital purchases like ebooks or streaming, the specific service (Kindle, Prime Video) may still work even if the main shopping site is down.

If AWS Is Down

AWS outages have bigger implications if your business runs on their cloud. Your response plan matters here.

Identify which services are affected. Check the AWS health dashboard and narrow down whether it is a specific service (EC2, S3, Lambda) or a region-wide issue. This determines what parts of your application are impacted.

Activate your incident response plan. If you have a vendor outage response playbook, now is the time to use it. Notify your team, communicate with affected customers, and start working through your mitigation steps.

Failover if possible. If you have multi-region deployments, route traffic to a healthy region. If you have redundant services from another provider, switch over. This is where advance planning pays off.

Communicate with your users. Let your customers know you are aware of the issue and working on it. Be honest that the problem is with a third-party provider. Our outage communication guide has templates for this.

Monitor for updates. Subscribe to the AWS status RSS feed or watch the health dashboard for updates. AWS typically posts updates every 15 to 30 minutes during active incidents.

How to Get Notified About Future Amazon Outages

Manually checking status pages every time something feels slow is not a sustainable approach. Here is how to set up proper alerting.

AWS Personal Health Dashboard. If you have an AWS account, the Personal Health Dashboard shows events that specifically affect your resources. This is more targeted than the public status page.

Status page RSS feeds. The AWS status page offers RSS feeds you can subscribe to. Add them to your RSS reader or connect them to a Slack channel via an integration.

Automated monitoring tools. Tools like Is That Down monitor vendor status pages on your behalf and send alerts through email, Slack, or webhooks the moment an issue is detected. This is the fastest way to find out about outages without watching a dashboard all day. For more on building a monitoring setup, see our vendor monitoring guide. Pairing vendor monitoring with uptime monitoring for your own services helps you quickly tell the difference between an internal issue and an upstream AWS failure.

Downdetector notifications. Downdetector offers a paid enterprise product with alerting capabilities, though the free version does not include notifications.

Recent Notable Amazon Outages

December 2021 AWS us-east-1 Outage

In December 2021, AWS experienced a major outage in the us-east-1 region that lasted roughly 10 hours. The issue affected the AWS management console, many AWS services, and countless websites and apps that depended on that region. Services like Disney+, Venmo, Slack, and Roomba were all impacted. The root cause was an automated scaling issue in the AWS network that triggered congestion and cascading failures.

June 2023 AWS Lambda and CloudFront Issues

In June 2023, AWS Lambda and CloudFront experienced degraded performance in multiple regions. The issue lasted several hours and affected serverless applications and content delivery. The incident highlighted how dependencies between AWS services can amplify the impact of a single component failing.

References

• AWS Service Health Dashboard - Official real-time status for all AWS services.
• AWS Post-Event Summaries - Detailed post-mortems of major AWS incidents.