Amazon’s Down: It’s Hip To Be Down!

Allen - June 6th, 2008

AmazonMaybe it’s a new trend – servers going down! Today it appears that Amazon has decided to join the crowd. Amazon is currently down as of 2:15pm Eastern and has been down for at least a bit, reports several CN readers.

When I attempt to load amazon.com, I get:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

That’s right, big arse Amazon seems to wanna be hip and trendy so they took the service down, or should I say unavailable. We’ve all seen what Twitter can do with some downtime and other large Internet services are feeling left out. YouTube for example had an outage recently to raise their hip level.

We are considering taking CN down later today because heck, we are the coolest tech blog out there today!

On a serious note, where’s Amazon’s status reporting service? How much income is being lost each minute they are down? It does look like Amazon’s S3 is up based on files loading here on CN.

As usual, please report in if Amazon is down where you are.

Update: 4:05pm Eastern – Amazon now reports the following “pretty” outage message:

Update: 2:22pm Eastern – Twitter couldn’t let Amazon have the fun alone – they decided to go down as well!

Update: 2:25pm Eastern – Greg Sandoval has done the math – “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.”

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26 COMMENTS
  1. JC John SESE Cuneta says:

    Amazon is UP and ONLINE here in the Philippines, Asean Community (Union :p ). But who uses Amazon here? Maybe a hundred people only. So few items that they ship here, so useless anyway :p

  2. Vinay says:

    Site seems to respond in SSL mode https://www.amazon.com/ !! And the API calls are working perfectly good.. so whats it with being down at http? A hack attempt or probably mis-configuration in protocol?

  3. Khang Toh says:

    Well, at least Amazon S3 is still alive and also if you really… I mean really need to buy something right now and can’t do it later, there is a little known secret url when http://www.amazon.com is a little overwhelm – its https://www.amazon.com/

    Khang

    (Damn I should have pasted the url with my amazon associates id)

  4. Anonymous says:

    Still down in North Reading, Massachusetts. This is the equivalent to a national chain of stores all being closed at the same time due to a fire or something. WOW.

  5. Polarbaer says:

    down in germany (amazon.com)

  6. aj batac says:

    Damn. $31,000 per minute? We can get funded already with that!

  7. Nik says:

    Down in Martinez, California. Darn it!

  8. centernetworks says:

    good point! like you drive from one mcdonalds to another and they are all out of service

  9. ricko says:

    Down in Washington State

  10. Anonymous says:

    Amazon back up in Atlanta, GA at 4:28 Eastern.

  11. Anonymous says:

    Still down in Chicago as of 3:20pm. Errrr.

  12. Anonymous says:

    Amazon still down in Atlanta, GA. 4:20 Eastern.

  13. Edmond Plummer says:

    At 08:34, Amazon is down in Saratoga Springs, NY

  14. Jeff Crites says:

    So …

    One loses 31 grand ($) a minute
    The other 31 thousand Tweets per minute

    Can someone do a dollar vs Tweet value comparison? Better would be some type of value put on the ‘potential value’ lost each minute Twitter is down. How much does each downtime session cost them in terms of user loyalty, getting bought out and/or future revenue stream.

  15. pixeldiva says:

    it’s down in Connecticut at 2:50pm

  16. Oh poor amazon. Who can really explain what is going on behind the scene.
    At the end of the day they hurt more business than needed.

    Glad we are not running Amazon S3

    ——-
    http://www.eCommerce-Themes.com

  17. Rudy says:

    Twitter friend, Brett, said https://www.amazon.com/ works. He’s right. It’s very slow, though.

  18. Sean says:

    My guess is it has to do with the release of the new PS3 / metal gear solid release that is VERY coveted (was supposed to go on sale at 10am at amazon.com). I know it sounds silly, but remember a similar thing happened back when they were doing some other mega sale on a current-gen console – can’t remember which one though.

  19. buck_nakie says:

    Amazon is back up in mass

  20. Amazon is down here in Tennessee. Weird.

  21. payam says:

    down in Virginia

  22. Anonymous says:

    down here – and i wanted to buy a kindle!

  23. Anonymous says:

    Actually, it’s been down since at least 1:35pm Eastern.

    Apparently AWS is still working: http://status.aws.amazon.com/

    So is their SSL site: https://www.amazon.com

  24. Anonymous says:

    Down in NYC

  25. Vinay says:

    Test from UK and its down and shows the same status code. But Amazon.co.uk is working fine and just placed an order there… glad I was not at .com :D !!

    And twitter was down couple of minutes back with message on home page saying they will be back in 15 minutes..!! Duh!!

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