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!)
Consumerist
Amazon.com seems to be back up. A bit slow, but functional. All in all, the site 
