Overview
- Amazon confirmed late Monday that its measures to block unauthorized data scraping have mistakenly flagged some real customers and limited their ability to see full product reviews.
- Affected shoppers reported being shown as few as eight reviews per product with sorting and filters removed and had to file appeal requests that in some cases took up to five business days to resolve.
- Amazon told reporters it identified incidents and restored access in those cases but declined to disclose how many users were affected, what detection signals it uses, or how it prevents false positives.
- Individual accounts describe inconsistent responses from customer service, token credits instead of clear explanations, and restrictions that persisted across devices and browser profiles despite users not using automation tools.
- The problem reflects a wider industry trend of stronger bot defenses and links to Amazon’s legal fight with agentic AI tools like Perplexity, raising risks that efforts to stop web crawlers will increasingly disrupt ordinary shoppers.