Overview

On January 29 2024 a major DHL network failure prevented many Amazon sellers from picking up, shipping, or confirming orders. Amazon responded by automatically excluding the affected transactions from three core account‑health metrics, ensuring that sellers are not penalized for a carrier issue outside their control. This relief is critical for sellers who rely on DHL, as metric violations can trigger warnings, suspensions, or even account closure.

Key Points

• Automatic exemption — Amazon is removing any cancellation, late‑shipment, or defect counts that stem from the January 29 DHL outage, without requiring sellers to file requests.
• Cancellation rate shield — Orders cancelled because DHL could not pick up parcels will not be tallied in the pre‑fulfillment cancellation metric, protecting sellers from the usual 2 % warning threshold.
• Late‑shipment buffer — Shipments delayed by the DHL network interruption are omitted from the late‑shipment calculation, which normally flags accounts that exceed a 4 % delay rate.
• Order‑defect rate protection — Negative feedback, A‑to‑Z Guarantee claims, and other defect indicators linked to the outage are excluded from the ODR, keeping the metric below the 1 % suspension trigger.
• No manual steps required — The exemptions are applied automatically to every seller account that shows DHL‑related order activity on the outage date.
• Dashboard verification recommended — Sellers should still review their Account Health Dashboard over the next few weeks to confirm that the adjustments appear as expected.

How the Penalty Waiver Works

1. Outage detection — Amazon’s system scans order records for shipments assigned to DHL on January 29 2024. If a package shows a “pickup failed,” “in‑transit delay,” or “cancellation” status, it is flagged for exemption.
2. Metric exclusion — For each flagged order, Amazon removes the corresponding data point from the cancellation‑rate, late‑shipment‑rate, and order‑defect‑rate calculations. For example, a seller who had five DHL cancellations that day will see those five orders disappear from the pre‑fulfillment cancellation numerator.