Updated: Amazon.com suffers outage

June 6, 2008 | Dean Takahashi | Comments | |

Amazon.com’s web site is down. A message left at Amazon’s PR hotline hasn’t yet been answered. The company’s stock price is also down this morning. It’s not clear why the outage is happening. Readers have noticed it since about 10:30 am Pacific time on Friday. The message that comes up is “http:/1.1 service unavailable.” (as of about 130 pm, the service was back online).

Amazon hasn’t had a big outage for a while. The costs of such outages can be enormous for e-commerce businesses. That’s why such companies have huge, redundant server architectures. That includes having backup data centers in multiple locations and countries. For a company this big, you don’t expect it to happen. But eBay suffers outages as well. In Amazon’s case, the company is leasing out a lot of its data center computing power to small companies. No word yet on whether the Amazon.com outage has affected those vendors too. But the Amazon web services site is also down now.

It’s no surprise that Amazon’s stock is down 3.8 percent, or $3.21, to $81.30 today. But everything fell today and it certainly seems like some day traders are jumping the gun on that. Cnet reported that some Amazon sites outside the U.S. appear to be working. Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion, Cnet estimated that a global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute.

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About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Chris Chen
    FYI
    https://www.amazon.com/
    is still available
  • John
    https://www.amazon.com/ can be reached but attempt to go anywhere else and you get a error message. Most important of all, you can't buy anything or access your shopping basket.
    And this didn't start this morning, I tried and couldn't make any purchases last night.

    I laugh because the legacy phone system I maintain for BOA is being replaced with a Cisco VOIP system. All voice and data on the net. The legacy system has been running, without interruption since 1982. The new VOIP system has already crashed, after six months.
  • Another business that needs to run to the library for "I.T. Wars: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium." The irony is, Amazon sells it. I urge every business person and IT person, management or staff, to get hold of a copy of this book. Our CEO has read it. Our project managers are on their second reading. Our vendors are required to read it (they can borrow our copies if they don't want to purchase it). Any agencies that wish to partner with us: We ask that they read it. Do yourself a favor and read this book - then ask your boss to read it - then ask your staff and co-workers to read it. If you get a chance, read the author's interview here: http://www.businessforum.com/DScott_02.html