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Amazon.com Suffers Search Glitch, Users Say

Posted by msmash on from the outage-report dept.

An anonymous reader writes: If you go to Amazon.com right now and attempt to search for a product, no items are appearing in the search results. Attempts to submit any feedback are failing too, with no error or response of any kind on the page. This is happening regardless of browser, operating system or ISP. On Twitter, numerous people have corroborated the issue. It appears the issue began roughly 40 minutes ago. Amazon has yet to acknowledge the glitch. Interestingly, Amazon's international properties, such as Amazon India, are not facing this issue.

25 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Hacked by Bernie Sanders by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 4, Funny

    Bernie Sanders is continuing his assault on Amazon by hacking them.

    --
    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    1. Re:Hacked by Bernie Sanders by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Bernie Sanders is continuing his assault on Amazon by hacking them

      He simply hooked Amazon up to Hillary's server.

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      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Hacked by Bernie Sanders by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Jared is routing purchases through his back-channel to Russia, it's just really slow. It was only designed to receive marching orders.

    3. Re:Hacked by Bernie Sanders by msauve · · Score: 2

      "Bernie Sanders is continuing his assault on Amazon by hacking them."

      I just realized the one thing Sanders and Trump have in common.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    4. Re:Hacked by Bernie Sanders by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      I just realized the one thing Sanders and Trump have in common.

      Bad hair, and they point too much.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  2. Microsoft fixed their problem... by InvalidsYnc · · Score: 1

    ...by moving to AWS and is now killing it!

    1. Re:Microsoft fixed their problem... by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Their cloud clearly clouded the crowded cloud. Clods.

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      Table-ized A.I.
  3. What glitch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I've never received relevant search results on Amazon.

    1. Re:What glitch? by packrat0x · · Score: 1

      If I get better (more useful) results on google with "site:[web address]" than with a website's built-in search, the search function needs to be re-done.

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      227-3517
  4. Streisandotted? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Maybe it's because everybody is telling everybody else to go take a look at blank results, flooding them further.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:Streisandotted? by omnichad · · Score: 2

      It doesn't look like a traffic problem. A search does return a number of results. Searching for something that has a large number of results does paginate correctly. But the actual API request to pull the actual items in seem to be returning a 2xx response with an empty body.

    2. Re:Streisandotted? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Different parts may have a different traffic limit. Microservice 1 may continue even if Microservice 2 is not functioning properly, for example.

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      Table-ized A.I.
    3. Re:Streisandotted? by omnichad · · Score: 1

      2xx is a successful response, and I assume they have enough brains to report hitting a traffic limit as an error. Also, they have the entire AWS system at their disposal. Why would they put in traffic limits or de-prioritize themselves vs. their AWS clients?

      Why the actual search results aren't in the page body and instead are fetched after page load is a question that I don't even want to try to answer.

      On the other hand, I do see 502 and 503 errors related to their (newish) advertising platform. And maybe that was implemented in a way that breaks the rest of the page. Google says this page was updated in the last 3 hours: https://advertising.amazon.com...

    4. Re:Streisandotted? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Our stack doesn't properly propagate errors. Could be theirs has a similar flaw. Plus, maybe not all layers are external.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    5. Re:Streisandotted? by nasch · · Score: 1

      I've heard amazon.com doesn't use AWS.

    6. Re:Streisandotted? by omnichad · · Score: 1

      They definitely eat their own dogfood. That's how AWS even came to be in the first place. Not everything is AWS, but I'm sure product search would be. This is from a few years ago:

      The WSJ spoke with a former Amazon executive who said that back-end databases with confidential data on them do not run in AWS’s cloud. An AWS spokesperson told the WSJ that “the vast majority of Amazon.com runs in AWS.” But not everything.

  5. Nooooooooo by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 1

    Must. Consume. NOW.

    1. Re:Nooooooooo by jomuyo · · Score: 1

      I know. I might have to venture outside, if this outage continues.

  6. Sounds like a problem by Fly+Swatter · · Score: 2

    for Amazon, not news sites. The fact this makes news is quite enlightening, and not in a good way. Next we will hear about the poor third party sellers losing sales because no one can find their products.

  7. Most indexes are failing... by nadass · · Score: 1

    But search results for simple keywords brings back movies ("power" brings up Power Rangers, "black" brings up Black Panther). I don't know their infrastructure architecture but maybe their product search indexes are off-line but their media properties' are okay or back up already?

    1. Re:Most indexes are failing... by omnichad · · Score: 1

      The search indexes are fine. You get a correct number of results listed, and paginated blank results page. The actual search results appear to load in via javascript after the empty page loads and that's what's failing. Everything is working except for populating the list on each page of results with titles, descriptions, and photos.

  8. Bullshit by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

    Search is working just fine.

  9. Bots attacking from Amazon owned network ranges by mike2006 · · Score: 2

    I just took a break from blocking Amazon owned IP networks and AWS instances at my router after finding my site getting slammed by nefarious bots making bogus automated queries from them. Then I came here and saw this thread.

    It has been going on for awhile but has picked up a bit where I finally got fed up enough to start blocking entire AWS subnets. I am going to take a guess Amazon search is being attack by bots from their own network.

  10. Re: Bots attacking from Amazon owned network range by mike2006 · · Score: 1

    I see allot of that to but in this case the bots coming from AWS and Amazon networks were smart enough to use various user agents. I know this is irrelevant to but right my worst bot traffic like you describe is coming out of China recently and 1000x worse. Amazon and Alibaba were pretty far down the list of offenders but bad enough were action had to be taken.

  11. wow by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 1

    We've come quite a ways if "website has glitch" is big news.