The news is still sporadic, but according to Amazon technical support, earlier today they made an upgrade to the website and they are currently investigating whether that is the cause of the service loss. The outage that we have been experiencing not only took down Amazon’s main site but it also affected CDNow and many of the other sites under Amazon’s umbrella.

To put this event into perspective, Amazon has not had more than 15 minutes of downtime in a month since 2006.

Amazon UK and their other international portals seem to be unaffected.

Most reports say that the site is losing just over $30,000 (though according to Oleg this might be inaccurate) a minute due to downtime, the market has responded sharply, and as of posting Amazon’s stock has lost over 4% dropping it to just above $80.00.

Earlier today, Amazon made a statement on their forum:

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

When asked by CNN, their customer service staff said the following:

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.

If estimates are accurate, Amazons losses so far can be measured in the millions. The rest of this story is still untold, we’ll get you more as it becomes available.

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