Amazon Prime Accounts Down, According to Users

Amazon Prime experienced a widespread outage affecting thousands of users in the United States and [...]

By Allison Schonter

Amazon Prime experienced a widespread outage affecting thousands of users in the United States and abroad late Wednesday night and into the early hours of Thursday morning, with users reporting that all spectrums of Prime services, including its shopping, video, and music services, were impacted. According to Down Detector, the widespread outage began at around 9 p.m. ET, with the tracking service showing issue reports spiking to more than 28,000.

As the issue continued, many Prime users took to Twitter to express their grievances, many reporting that their attempts to contact Amazon proved fruitless as the phonelines were "saturated" by other callers.

"Amazon Prime Video has had 26,000+ customer reporting an outage," one person wrote. "Their chat and phone help lines are saturated."

"Prime Video is down and won't let me watch anything," another wrote. "Many people are tweeting about a similar outage, but no official amazon accounts seem to have addressed the apparently widespread outage."

Several people reported that when they attempted to access the Amazon Prime website, they were presented with a screen asking them to "start your membership today," despite that they already had a membership and it was not time to renew it.

"Is your service down at this time?" one person asked. "I was just watching an episode of a TV show on my fire stick, I paused it and when I returned it now wants to charge me $2.99 to resume...?"

"Is prime video down?" asked another. "Titles aren't available now, then there are some that say are prime but still asking to pay. What's going on???"

Shortly after the first reports surfaced, Amazon acknowledged the issue in a statement on its website.

"We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please return later for more information about Prime," the statement read.

Thankfully, the issue seems to have been resolved, with Down Detector showing a drastic drop in reported incidents. As of this posting, only six issues were reported. A cause of the outage has not been revealed.

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