Amazon’s latest delivery innovation has made a splash. Unfortunately, it was in a customer’s swimming pool.
A Texas woman, Lindsey Austen, was waiting excitedly for her first Prime Air order when an Amazon drone hovered above her backyard, opened its compartment, and dropped the parcel straight into the water.
It is an undeniably funny video. It is also a nice example of how quickly a futuristic customer experience can turn into a very public CX problem.
Lindsey Austen, who lives in Richmond, Texas, had gotten an alert that her Amazon order would be delivered by drone to her home for the first time.
Footage shows the drone hovering above her pool, then releasing her package into the water pic.twitter.com/yTtpUqv5XP
— Sky News (@SkyNews) August 20, 2026
In its official announcement on expanding Prime Air to nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, Amazon stated:
“Prime Air is built to operate responsibly, and the safety of the employees, customers, and communities Amazon serves is the top priority.”
In this case, nobody was hurt, and the drone did not crash. Still, a waterlogged package is unlikely to be the frictionless, under-an-hour delivery experience Amazon had in mind.
The incident raises a familiar question for enterprises rolling out customer service technology: what happens when the automation gets it wrong at the exact point the customer sees it?
The Order That Got Lost in Translation
Amazon is hardly alone in learning that automated experiences can unravel in highly visible ways.
McDonald’s faced a similar challenge at the very start of the customer journey.
In June 2024, the fast-food giant ended its automated order-taking partnership with IBM after testing AI drive-thru technology in more than 100 US restaurants.
The system was intended to make ordering quicker and easier. Instead, viral videos showed it adding unwanted items, mixing up orders, and, in one case, generating more than $250 worth of McNuggets meals.
McDonald’s had previously said the technology was accurate around 85% of the time. Yet that remaining 15% can feel rather more significant when a customer is staring at a drive-thru screen full of food they never ordered.
In a statement made at the time, McDonald’s said: