Whoa Amazon is down. It just says, “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.” Then I tried again and the front page was there, but when I clicked through, same error message. It looks like it’s been this way since at least 1:30 PM, eastern. It was broken for several Consumerist writers who tested it out.
How much money do you think they’re losing every second? Well, Cnet says, “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.” However, that won’t be happening as the international Amazon sites are still up. An Oct ’07 Bloomberg article says US and Canadian sales account for 55% of revenue, so based on that, they’re losing roughly $17,050 per minute. The stock market seems to have taken notice; Marketwatch says, “Shares of Amazon were down 2.7% to $82.25 in early afternoon trading.”
A post on an online forum for Amazon sellers says, “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.”” Does anyone have a spare paperclip? Time to hit the reset button.
UPDATE: 4:04 -It’s spluttering back from the dead. Pages load very slowly and clicking around may still lead to dead pages.
UPDATE: 4:31 – It’s alive! A bit slow, but now once again you can buy everything in the world without leaving your house! Huzzah!
(Thanks to fivecentnickel!)
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Yup. Up in Atlanta, but slower than usual.
Looks like all the sterling silver jewelry links are working…for all the cheap ass playahs out there.
@Ayo:
Main page is back up but you can’t go anywhere else.
I guarantee they still won’t sell another Kindle today.
Down for me, but my husband can get to it
Homepage up, most pages won’t load. If I a link and it gives me a forbidden, I hit back and keep trying. Eventually it loads.
Its sorta half-up. Once you start searching products you get the http 1.1 error.
I blame LOLCATS for this one.
Not only does it result in an error if you try to navigate off of the home page but it tells you that it’s your fault!
Dude, what the shiggity?
(It’s still failing without the ‘www’)
It just got back up for me.
For all you lefties here, I’ll say it for you – It’s all Bush’s fault…
amazon has turned to crap.. in their efforts to sell everything under the sun, they’ve basically just become a middleman, trying to rip off the ebay business model.
no longer does amazon take any responsibility for anything you buy. when i think i’m buying something through amazon, really they’re just send my information along to some 3rd party home-business-resaler
the last 2 things i tried to order off amazon both never arrived, and they never even put the charges through. the first one, the order was just mysteriously cancelled one day, the 2nd one, they put me on back order a week after i ordered it, then one day just said the order is cancelled.
the REAL kicker is that doing business this way allows the 3rd party sellers to subscribe you to all their email lists, without even sending you a product.
for shame, amazon. for shame.
I think it just went back up… I couldn’t access anything 5 minutes ago, but now it works fine, albeit a bit slow.
Still down in WI.
When Amazon said bad things would happen if they had to pay NY sales tax, did anyone listen?
If it turns out to be script kiddies nuking Amazon, I’ll be really upset. That they didn’t target eBay instead.
It sounds like a problem with the load balancer; some people are getting kicked to a server that’s still up, while others are being shuffled (by the load balancer) to servers that are down.
@Southern: That seems like the best guess so far.
Dear Amazon,
Now that you’re back up, can you get around to shipping my 4e D&D books?
“This page is usually shown when we believe that the request is coming from a robot or other automated source of requests. If you are not a robot please contact us immediately by emailing ad-help-us@amazon.com and we will reinstate your access to our website.”
Isn’t this like, discrimination against robots or something?
@rbb: What?
I just tried again and now Amazon is calling me a robot and taunting me with a picture of a dog on the page.
And it’s telling me I need to email them and prove that I’m not some robot. Whaaaaat?
A friend of a friend (who is at amazon) is claiming the outage is the result of a DOS attack.
Amazon, come back to me!
I don’t want to have to drive to a store, pay roughly the same price, and receive my items after my payment is processed.
I…I can’t handle that. I’m too used to waiting 5-9 business days for things I paid for.
Wouldn’t the people who couldn’t get there at 1330 EST just go back later and buy what they want? It just means the later hours (or minutes, I guess) will be more profitable than usual.
@squatchie44: No, silly. It was $4 gasoline!
I’m curious as to how this $30k+/day formulation is made. It looks like it’s simply $4.1B / 90 days, which seems to be of dubious applicability: Is the assumption that anyone who was greeted with an error page when looking to buy something wouldn’t just come back in a few hours and buy it after Amazon was back up? That doesn’t sound very scientific. I’m not an economist; perhaps I’m missing something?
@MrGrimes: Dad? I tried to avenge your death.
Losing $17,050 per minute? I doubt they’ll loose a dime- if the site is down you’ll just go back later to buy your crap.
Maybe Amazon was trying to calculate how much tax it needs to collect and pay the State of New York. It’s their version of Y2K: Y2K8.
some clown has really, really poisoned DNS, for example:
% whois amazon.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to [www.internic.net]
for detailed information.
AMAZON.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
AMAZON.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
AMAZON.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM
AMAZON.COM
To single out one record, look it up with “xxx”, where xxx is one of the
of the records displayed above. If the records are the same, look them up
with “=xxx” to receive a full display for each record.
Well, if I can’t reach Amazon online, I’ll just run out to their local store. Hmm…
Wouldn’t it be cool instead of a 404 message, they had the Amazon smiley logo with a sad face instead!
Hey where’s Amazon giving gifts to their customers for the downtime like Netflix did? They better. WE DESERVE IT.
[consumerist.com]
Amazon lost my business this morning, not because of the downtime, but beacuse they failed to notify me that my pre-ordered D&D books wouldn’t show up for 3 months after release (last friday). An email would of sufficed, but I had to find out on my own. Been shopping with them since day one, and this is strike 2, I’m not going to strike out, so screw you amazon, ya got too big and customers are starting to slip through your grasp.
newegg.com has grown much faster and never fails to notify me when something isn’t going to arrive on time.
There I’m done, I was going to email the tip line, but I have to go drive around town looking for a copy, if any still exist.
@Android8675: How soon is Newegg going to get your 4th Ed. books to you?
I pre-ordered mine from Amazon way in advance, and had no trouble getting them. And at $55 … happy with the price. Even though I had digital copies a couple weeks early.