Amazon Down

For at least the last 10 minutes 2 hours, visits to Amazon have produced the following:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

I am not sure what the problem is, but in the time it has taken you to think about it, Amazon has probably lost more money than most of us make in a year.

UPDATE – Amazon’s statement -

Greetings from Amazon.com,

We are 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.

Regards,

Technical Account Management

Amazon.com

UPDATE – As of 4:18 EST, according to CNNMoney

An Amazon.com customer-service representative said the site wouldn’t be fully functional for another one or two hours. She said the outage was due to an upgrade of the company’s Web site, but didn’t provide further details.

UPDATE – As of now, everything seems to be working. That being said, for a site as large as Amazon to go down completely (even for under an hour) seems strange. What I am interested in knowing is whether anyone else was able to recreate this problem, whether it was local (regional), or whether anyone knows what might have caused it?

UPDATE – As of 2:02 PM EST, the server seems to have died again.

UPDATE – As of 2:18 PM EST, even CDNow is down.

UPDATE – CenterNetworks reports that Amazon is losing $31,000 a minute. Anyone know what’s happening? It feels like this might be a data-center issue. CNET reports that Amazon UK, Amazon China and a few more international clusters seem to be working.

UPDATE

Thanks to Oleg,

The cost is far smaller than $3.7 Million. These are list sales, not net profits. Net income $143M in the first quarter. That’s $49.6K per hour.

UPDATE – As of 3:18, Amazon is back up. Assuming no more outages, that puts the total cost of this fiasco at about $3.7 Million.

UPDATE – According to MarketWatch – Shares of Amazon were down 2.7% to $82.25 in early afternoon trading.