Kansas City metro businesses halt online orders amidst Amazon outage
OVERLAND PARK, KANSAS — A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Monday left several Kansas City metro businesses scrambling after their online ordering systems suddenly went dark.
The disruption, which also affected popular apps like Snapchat, Fortnite and Toast, a widely used restaurant point-of-sale platform, caused restaurants and shops to lose an entire day of digital sales.
See the latest headlines in Kansas City and across Kansas, Missouri
“We haven’t received a single online order,” said Rameen Sharifi, owner of Pegah’s Restaurant. “DoorDash, UberEats, Grubhub and even our website are all tied to the same platform. Everything’s down.”
For local restaurants that rely heavily on online orders, especially during the lunch and dinner rush, the outage brought business to a standstill. Sharifi says all five Pegah’s locations were hit by the outage, resulting in what he estimates as “thousands of dollars in lost revenue.”
Sharifi and Fifth & Emery frozen yogurt owner, Isaac Lee Collins use Toast. While both owners say smaller outages have happened before, this one stretched on for hours longer than usual, cutting off sales channels they depend on daily.
“We can’t even look at what sales would be right now,” Collins said. “So we’re just kind of hoping and praying that it’ll pop back on before dinner rush gets here.”
Collins said his business faced extra challenges because of its self-serve model, where prices vary by customer. Without Toast’s platform running, employees had to calculate each order.
“The frozen yogurt is self-serve, so it makes it a little more difficult to track how much that may be at the time,” Collins said. “So far, customers have been really patient as we figure that out.”
“All we can hope for is that customers will come in and support local businesses like ours,” Sharifi said. “Or maybe we’ll see an increase in online orders once everything comes back.”
Blue Valley teacher speaks out after controversial firing
Despite the setback, Collins says he’s already thinking ahead.
“We’re brainstorming marketing ideas to make up that lost revenue,” he said. “In this industry, adaptability is everything.”
Both Sharifi and Collins say they understand that digital platforms come with risks, but they’re hoping for a quick resolution from AWS and Toast.
“It’s just the world we live in today, a world that relies on the internet,” Sharifi said. “And this is a great example of what could happen if the internet goes out.”
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
