Luckily, cardboard floats.
An Amazon delivery drone dropped a Texas woman’s package into her backyard pool on Monday, flummoxing the woman, who told Business Insider she didn’t think she selected the drone delivery option.
“I was inside the house and I heard it,” Lindsey Austen said on Thursday. “I was like, ‘Is the second coming of Jesus happening?'”
An Amazon customer in Texas was not enthused when her first drone-delivered order was dropped into her swimming pool. After hearing the loud buzzing of the drone arriving, she ran outside to record the delivery, and to her surprise, it landed in her pool. pic.twitter.com/6TIcrJIVAR
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) August 19, 2026
The incident, which Austen captured on video, went viral on X on Thursday. In the clip, an Amazon drone hovers above Austen’s pool before releasing a package straight into the water.
“After I finished recording, I ran and got it really quick,” Austen said. “The box was completely wet and drenched.”
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson did not address the Texas splashdown directly, but said that “incidents” with its delivery drones “are extremely rare.”
“When a delivery doesn’t go as planned, we learn from it to improve the experience and tae steps to prevent it from happening in the future,” the spokesperson, Lindsay Hamilton, said.
Launched in 2022, Amazon announced this week that it would expand its drone delivery service to nearly 500 more cities and towns by the end of the year. Customers can order anything by drone that weighs 5 pounds or less and fits in a large shoebox, the company says. That’s the majority of the millions of packages ordered on Amazon every day.
Austen said the package contained dry cat food and shoe insoles for her daughter, neither of which was damaged by the water landing.
The resident of Richmond, a suburb of Houston, said she included those items, along with some light bulbs, in one “normal” order. Soon after ordering, however, she got a notification that the cat food and insoles were coming via drone.
“I kind of think like mine was an error, to be honest, because I didn’t select it,” Austen said of the drone delivery option.
To select the drone option, which Amazon calls Prime Air, customers must confirm their delivery location using the map feature in the Amazon app, according to an Amazon news release.
The drones are not flown by pilots, but navigate autonomously using onboard cameras and sensors.
Austen said her family has never ordered anything with drones before.
“I ordered like I normally do every single time,” she said.
Austen said that although the package arrived quickly — in about 20 minutes, she said — the loud noise dissuaded her from selecting the option again.
Still, she said, watching a drone deliver her Amazon order felt distinctly futuristic.
“It’s bizarre,” she said. “We’re living in the Jetsons era.”
