Sellers Say Amazon Charged Ad Fees throughout Thursday’s Outage
On March 5 2026 Amazon experienced a three‑hour outage (2‑8 p.m. ET) that kept the storefront on a “dog page” error while ad servers kept serving Sponsored Product ads. Clicks rose to 420 in the window, costing $189 and dropping conversion to <0.1 %, prompting Amazon to promise ad‑spend reimbursement.
Overview
On Thursday, March 5 2026 Amazon’s retail platform experienced a multi‑hour outage that prevented shoppers from browsing, adding items to carts, or completing checkout. The disruption also blocked sellers from accessing listings, responding to buyer messages, and running advertising campaigns normally, prompting concerns about lost revenue and ad spend charged during the downtime.
Key Points
- Outage duration — The incident lasted roughly three hours, from about 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. ET, according to DownDetector traffic spikes.
- Customer experience — Shoppers repeatedly encountered Amazon’s “dog page” error, which displays a cartoon dog and the message “UH‑Oh. Something went wrong on our end.”
- Locker access failure — At least one buyer reported being unable to retrieve a package from an Amazon locker, seeing only a spinning wheel and receiving no resolution after more than an hour.
- Seller listing blackout — Multiple sellers posted that their product pages returned 404 errors, showed no buy box, and omitted images, pricing, or any product details.
- Ad clicks without conversions — Advertisers observed a sharp rise in click volume during the outage, yet conversion rates fell to near zero because customers could not reach a functional checkout.
- Messaging bottleneck — Sellers attempting to reply to buyer inquiries saw messages marked as “processing” and then disappearing, leaving communications unanswered.
- Vine reviewer lockout – Members of Amazon’s Vine program were unable to submit reviews, further limiting post‑purchase engagement.
- Kindle catalog freeze – Kindle users reported that book descriptions and download options were unavailable, effectively halting ebook sales.
- Amazon’s response – The company attributed the problem to a software code deployment issue and later confirmed it would reimburse advertisers for spend incurred during the outage window.
How the Advertising Charge Occurred
- — Amazon’s ad platform continued to serve sponsored product and headline search ads even after the storefront began returning error pages. For example, a seller’s “organic coffee beans” ad was still displayed to users who clicked but landed on a dog‑page error.
Analysis & Recommendations
Why This Matters
Sellers were billed for hundreds of clicks that could not convert, inflating ACOS to over 100 % and potentially skewing Amazon’s automated bidding algorithms. Without a refund and metric correction, future campaign performance and budget allocation could be harmed.
Key Takeaways
- Outage lasted ~3 hours (2‑8 p.m. ET) on March 5 2026, showing the “dog page” error.
- During the outage, clicks jumped to 420 (vs 150/h baseline) and spend rose $189 with conversion <0.1 %.
- Pre‑outage baseline: 150 clicks/hour, 3.2 % conversion, $0.45 CPC, ACOS 18 %.
- Amazon confirmed it will reimburse advertisers for spend incurred during the outage window.
Recommended Actions
- →Pause affected campaigns in Seller Central > Advertising > Campaign Manager as soon as error pages appear.
- →Export the ad performance report for March 5 2026 (Seller Central > Advertising > Reports) and submit a support ticket via Seller Central > Help > ...
- →After the refund, monitor campaign metrics for 48 hours (Seller Central > Advertising > Campaign Manager) and manually adjust bids if ACOS remains ...
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