Amazon retail had an outage on March 5, 2026 that was attributed by some reporting to AI going off the rails. Amazon, of course, said it was user error. Around the exact same day or two, I was ordering something mundane from them, and the items were already in transit.
At some point, I triggered one of Amazon’s automated systems. It flagged something as suspicious, apparently somewhere in the authentication process. I don’t allow websites to store a lot of the tracking data they want to store, so it was probably connected to that. When you don’t fully agree to being tracked, the tradeoff is that many systems start treating you like a bot. Expect to solve a lot more captchas if you want to maintain some freedom.
The net effect was that my account was disabled after I probably hammered the site for a few minutes, meaning I kept trying to log in to check the status of something. Of course, that has the unintended consequence of making you look even more like a bot. That’s the rub with AI and automation: the differences between a person and a bot are becoming less clear.
Eventually, I triggered the “account disabled” flag. This all happened while Amazon was telling me to renew Prime. In fact, items were still in transit while Amazon was saying I needed to renew Prime. I was getting emails saying my Prime membership was expiring, then expired, while I couldn’t log in. Then I received emails saying my in-transit items were automagically canceled. Hmm. So I guess I really convinced Amazon that I wasn’t me, and that ordering items to my own house was somehow fraudulent. Hmmmmm.
Eventually, logging in redirected me to a form where I could tell Amazon all about myself and my bills, send a redacted photograph of my credit card, and then wait for a human to process it within 24 hours and make a decision. At that point, I was pretty much convinced this was a blessing in disguise and that my spending on Amazon needed to come to an end. That said, I submitted the form as requested and received a generic rejection letter a few days later.
I forgot about Amazon for a week or two, and then I received an email telling me my account was closed. It included a bunch of generic language about how sorry they were, while also saying their decision was final. Naturally, there was no real recourse. But that was okay.
So Amazon did me a favor: they forced my hand at leaving them. I’m sure no milk will be spilled over it, but it does feel good to be freed from them. Lesson learned: it’s hard to part with convenience. But sometimes morality wins.