• 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.

    1. Bloggers and Twitter users first reported issues at around 1:57 p.m. EST User DCancel on Twitter: Anyone else having trouble getting to Amazon.com? (June 6, 2008) User Robert Svihla on Twitter: How weird...Amazon.com is down for me. "Service Unavailable"(June 6, 2008)
    2. Services started becoming available at 3: 20 pm EST for some users
    3. Amazon's S3 service operating normallyBits (NYT): Amazon’s Web Site Goes Down: An 'Unplanned Event' (June 6, 2008)
    4. Amazon spokesperson says website back up at 2: 30 pm ESTEpicenter (Wired): Amazon Back Up After Outage (June 6, 2008)
    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."Cnet.com: Amazon suffers U.S. outage on Friday (June 6, 2008)

  • 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."Bits (NYT): Amazon’s Web Site Goes Down: An 'Unplanned Event' (June 6, 2008)