Amazon Kindles can’t download books due to an outage

An outage was preventing Amazon Kindle users from downloading both new and previously purchased books to their e-readers, as noted on Amazon’s support forums and Reddit, but the company says things should be resolved. “Yesterday, some Kindle customers experienced an issue that impacted their ability to download e-books. The issue was quickly resolved,” writes Amazon devices spokesperson Jackie Burke in an email sent to The Verge.

Good e-Reader reported the problem on Wednesday, noting a response from Amazon support at the time that said it was the result of “server issues” and that “it would be at least 48 hours before ebooks started downloading again, but it could be longer.”

In a post today on Amazon’s support forums, a staff member recommended that a person still seeing problems today should restart their device by holding down the power button for 40 seconds and try again.

The forum post included many reports of Kindles that were only able to download the title and cover art of books before the progress indicator got stuck at 1 percent. The outage also seemed to affect downloading books from Overdrive to Kindle devices using Libby. However, downloading books to the iOS and Android Amazon Kindle apps is not affected.

This latest issue comes a week after several Kindle users on Reddit reported a problem with Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” feature, which allows ebooks and documents to be sideloaded onto the e-readers without having to plug them into a computer. Some users received error messages telling them their files “could not be delivered due to a service error,” while other users in the thread were still seeing problems with the service earlier this week.

Update, July 4th: Added statement from Amazon and updated to note the issue has been resolved.