Amazon Down

On Friday June 6, 2008 Amazon.com's U.S. website was unavailable for several hours. Users of the otherwise reliable Internet site were greeted by a blank page with the message "Http / 1.1 Service Unavailable."

Around 3:00 pm EST, a message was added: "We're sorry! An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we're already working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly."

Shortly after the message was posted, the website's front page was once again visible—though the links were not working.

Fast Facts

1. Bloggers and Twitter users first reported issues at around 1:57 p.m. EST ^{1 2}
2. Services started becoming available at 3:20 pm EST for some users
3. Amazon's S3 service operating normally³
4. Amazon spokesperson says website back up at 2:30 pm EST⁴
5. On February 15, 2008, Amazon's S3, an online storage service run by Amazon was down for several hours

Loss Estimate

CNET blogger Greg Sandoval estimates: "Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average."⁵

Discussion Forum Message

On Amazon's official discussion forum, a message was posted at 10:37 am West Coast time that says, "currently investigating an issue that has impacted the availability of the Amazon.com website. Engineers are actively engaged in resolving this issue and we will provide an update once the issue is resolved. We appreciate your patience during this time."³

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