Amazon UK outage blamed on Sky Shield: here’s how to get around it

Visitors to Amazon's UK website domain have reported access issues since yesterday, with many pointing the finger at Sky broadband as the culprit. 

Since roughly 6.00 pm GMT on January 14, some UK users have been unable to access the website, login, or make purchases. Extremely slow or unresponsive connections have also been reported.

According to Downdetector's real-time fault map, London appears to be a hotspot for Amazon issues, but outage issues have been picked up as far north as Dundee in Scotland at the time of writing. The main Amazon.com domain appears to be unaffected.

This morning, a pattern in the outage has appeared: Sky broadband. 

Users highlighted Sky Broadband Shield as a potential reason for the failure to load Amazon UK, especially when other websites are operating normally. Shield is a form of firewall that can provide a layer of protection against malware, phishing websites, and can be used to block adult content as a family control. 

However, it may be that Shield has accidentally interrupted access to one of the world's largest e-commerce domains. 

If you are experiencing issues accessing Amazon UK this morning, try logging into your Sky account and disabling this feature, at least temporarily. 

As a Sky account holder, I also found using a virtual private network (VPN) connection restored access and I was once again able to make purchases. 

Amazon declined to comment. 

Update 17.11 pm GMT: Sky told ZDNet that yesterday, Sky Broadband incorrectly identified a domain used by Amazon as phishing or malware-related, and has now added Amazon's domain to an allow list, resolving the issue. The company apologized to impacted customers. 

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