Updated. Amazon.com’s main website appeared to be down for many visitors for a 45-minute-long period today, with the site returning a mostly blank page that reads “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.”
Here is a screenshot of what some visitors saw when visiting Amazon.com:
A look at a cURL of the site at the time of the outage showed that Amazon’s homepage is returning a 503 Error, which indicates that the server powering the site is temporarily down due to maintenance or overloading. Internal links were still working, but at what seemed like a slower pace. Meanwhile, AWS, Amazon’s cloud hosting service for other websites, is up and running just fine.
503 Errors can be the result of a denial-of-service attack, although it’s impossible to say right now whether that is the case here.
The outage was noticed by Hacker News contributor Nathan Bashaw at around 11:40am PT. Needless to say, a more than 40 minute-long outage for a site as massive as Amazon.com is very unusual.
We’ve reached out to Amazon and will update this with anything we hear.
Update: The last 503 Error we pulled up on the Amazon.com homepage was at about 12:25pm PT, some 45 minutes after the first user reports of the outage began. At the moment, however (12:30pm PT) the site appears to be back up, and this article has been amended to reflect that. We are still waiting for word from Amazon on what happened.
Update #2: Amazon has confirmed the 49 minute outage to TechCrunch.
Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN), is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon is one of the first companies to sell products deep into the long tail by housing them in numerous warehouses and distributing products from many partner companies. Amazon directly sells or acts as a platform for the sale of a broad range of products. These include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. The majority of Amazon’s...
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