If your Amazon dashboard looks like a rollercoaster this week—don’t panic. It’s (probably) not your ads, your metadata, or Mercury in retrograde. It’s Amazon.
What Happened
Starting late Sunday night and rolling into Monday, Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the cloud backbone that powers everything from Alexa to your KDP reports—went down. And not just a little blip.
This was a major outage centered in AWS’s US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, one of the busiest data hubs in the world. According to the Associated Press, a combination of DNS resolution failures and internal network issues prevented servers within that region from communicating properly. The problem wasn’t limited to a few websites, the effects were global, impacting everything from warehouses and e-commerce platforms to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Amazon Ads.
That includes Amazon.com itself and many internal systems authors, publishers, and vendors rely on daily.
For most people, the visible symptoms showed up as:
- Sales reports and dashboards freezing or back-dating
- Incomplete ad spend and impression data
- Royalties that looked suspiciously low (or zero)
- Orders vanishing, only to “magically” reappear hours later
The outage officially wrapped up Monday evening, but like any big system crash, the aftershocks are still being felt.
The Ripple Effect: Why Your Numbers Don’t Add Up
Even after AWS declared “all systems operational,” the data didn’t immediately catch up. Amazon’s retail and ad dashboards depend on a complex web of servers and reporting queues and when those queues jam, they don’t just fix themselves overnight.
That’s why some authors saw:
- 24- to 48-hour delays in ad data (impressions, clicks, sales)
- Sales showing up in the KDP or Ads dashboard one hour just to disappear the next
- Royalty reports updating out of sequence or not showing up at all
If you run Amazon Ads or check your KDP dashboard obsessively (no judgment), this week’s reports probably looked grim, but in most cases, the sales did happen. The data’s just taking the scenic route.
Ongoing Amazon Ads and Account Reporting Errors
As of today, the problems haven’t completely cleared. When logging into several Amazon Ads accounts this morning, we’re still seeing active error messages like this one:
“We’re experiencing a temporary interruption in reporting of store visit metrics, including detail page views. We’re working to fix it. No metrics have been lost, and any missing information will be available after resolution. We apologize for any inconvenience and will update when resolved.”
That message confirms that store-visit and product-detail-page metrics remain incomplete, even though campaigns continue to run. For authors and publishers, that means data visibility remains unreliable until Amazon’s reporting backlog fully syncs.
What This Means for Authors and Publishers
Here’s the short version: don’t make business decisions based on this week’s numbers.
Pause before you:
- Cut ad budgets because you think your campaigns “stopped working”
- Adjust pricing or promos because sales “fell off a cliff”
- Assume your BookBub or newsletter promo “flopped”
Amazon’s systems are still syncing, and there’s a good chance data from October 20–22 will backfill over the next few days.
What You Can Do Right Now
A few calm, practical steps while Amazon gets its act together:
- Cross-check sales. Compare order-confirmation emails, Author Central updates, and rank history. Those often update faster than KDP reports.
- Leave ads alone. Incomplete reporting can make CPCs, ACOS, and ROI look skewed right now.Don't pause ads unless they’re clearly overspending. Data may be delayed, not inaccurate.
- Flag anomalies. Note missing orders, reporting gaps, or large revenue swings—you’ll want to compare them once data backfills.
- Communicate with your team or clients. Let them know this week’s data is unreliable; it saves a lot of unnecessary worry.
- Keep receipts. If you’re tracking ad spend for accounting or reimbursements, download daily snapshots to compare later.
Bottom Line
If your reports look weird this week—lagging, missing, or flat-lined— breathe. You’re not alone. And you didn’t suddenly forget how to sell books. Amazon’s systems did.
Things are stabilizing now, but expect another day or two of catch-up before everything looks “normal.” In the meantime, don’t overreact, don’t panic, and maybe pour yourself a coffee (or something stronger). You’ve earned it.
