Stuff Your Kindle Day happens occasionally and is primarily focused on Romance, dark fantasy and science fiction e-books. For one day, many bestsellers and popular books are discounted or made available for free. This usually goes without a hitch, and readers are happy with their digital haul. However, with the December 27th Stuff Your Kindle Day, people were downloading dozens or hundreds of books, and their accounts were getting banned by Amazon AI. Customer Service agents have no idea what is happening and cannot restore their accounts.
Users are getting logged out of their accounts when using the Kindle app for Android or iOS in addition to their Kindle e-readers. Amazon services such as Prime Video, Amazon Shopping, Amazon Music, and even Alexa smart speakers no longer work. Send to Kindle also no longer has any functionality when logged out. This prevents users from sending PDF documents to Kindle Scribe for editing. Once a user is logged out of their accounts, they cannot log back in.
When locked out, users receive a message stating that their accounts are locked due to suspicious activity. Amazon then asks them to verify their billing information via email. Some users are even asked to provide a government ID. However, most emails are not sent, so users are left in a lurch and wondering what is happening.
Amazon customer service told Good e-Reader that the issue was on their end, not the users. Another agent said affected users could see their accounts restored within 24 hours. Many Amazon workers are on strike, which could hamper restoring customer accounts.
This is the first time that Stuff Your Kindle Day has had such dire repercussions. Amazon AI likely noticed users downloading far more free and low-cost e-books than usual, thus flagging the accounts as suspicious. It could even be concluded that the account got hacked, and verification is needed to ensure this did not happen.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
