Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon.com was down for many people in the US for a short while Thursday afternoon. A number of Verge staffers were unable to access the site, and countless user reports of an outage across the country poured in on Downdetector.
It’s exceedingly rare for Amazon’s main e-commerce site to have an outage that was as extensive as today’s, but it’s not unprecedented for Amazon’s internet services to go down. In 2017, Amazon’s widely used cloud computing division, AWS, had an outage that took down many other services and websites that relied on it.
We’ve reached out to the company for more information, including whether this outage extended beyond the US and whether it affected other platforms like…