Amazon Is Down
Michael Arrington
57 comments »
Reports are coming in that Amazon.com is down…and sure enough it is. I’ve got a ping into Amazon PR to see if this is something serious (for a site like this to go down on a week day, it probably is). If anyone has information on when it first went down, please let us know. It sounds like the outage has been for an extended period of time and is affecting international sites as well.
Update: It’s back up as of 12:30 PST, at least for me.
Further Update: From Amazon PR:
“The site was down briefly earlier today, but it’s back up and running now….”
and
“I’m afraid we don’t comment on our technology, except to say that these are complex systems, and we do our best to make sure they’re always functioning. When there are problems, we try to get them corrected as quickly as possible.
Thanks for checking.”
germany and uk are also down
the frontpage is available but search is not working
Wow! I will be waiting for the cause….It has been down for almost an hour now..that is a lost of lost revenue for Amazon.
Mike -
I think it was my $24 book order during lunch that did em in!
I was getting this error message intermitently over the weekend on the US site.
Wow, that’s bad. How much $$$ do they gross per hour?
It has been down for quite a while.
wow… I cannot believe this!
I am sure they must be running on multiple colos, so how can this be?
Out of curiosity - can anyone see if S3 data is down?
Some circulating rumors online about Amazon’s venture in the movie download service offer. They just might be implementing it and needed the time out. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
^
Sami that is what i’m thinking too.
S3 seems to be ok, I was able to connect to it and list some content
Wondering what Obidos was in Amazon.com’s link, found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%....._Par%C3%A1
Considering it’s now late August, maybe this is what’s going on?
This isn’t a planned outage… Nobody would do this with a planned outage. Worst case they’d put “we’re upgrading stuff for you”. Best case they’d roll back to a static layout or something.
@farhad. I’d think they have their own data centers… It must be a software or hacking issue. not hardware.
Its back online now.
Ted, they probably gross around $10-20k/hour.
Had to be nearly 2+ hours of outage… my order earlier was at 12:41 EST and they crashed right after that. It’s now 3:37 EST.
german version has still problems:
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
amazon.de is still _unavailable_ - since about an hour - for me at least : | .
the CFO must have forgotten to submit his online bill pay this month
There are no items in all dvd categories !
Amazon France (www.amazon.fr) is also down, but Amazon Japan (www.amazon.co.jp) appears to still be up.
From what I’m hearing, it absolutely was not planned, but it’s back now.
seppl: European Amazon sites are still down.
Andreas: Shift+Reload
UK site is back up but it’s not working as it should. Search is messed up.
Try almost $1MM an hour.
Last week the affiliates section and checking an order were very very slow.
No product page works on amazon.de, even though the main page and the search is up.
Looks like someone didn’t pay the electricity bills.
Just tried emailing a friend at amazon, and it seems their mail servers are down too.
Personally, I think it must be that my book just came out and they couldn’t cope with the rush.
(ah, dreams!)
steve
Amazon has at least two datacenters
http://www.fixedorbit.com/AS/16/AS16509.htm
@Chris in comment #6 might be right. Now (after the down-time) “obidos” is gone in the URLs
“obidos” is still in some URLs, such as in the “See All 34 Product Categories” top nav tab:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obi.....ores.html/
One hour of absense is very hurting for such a big player. I guess someone had ordered too many books and Amazon’s server could not handle to compute.
Thank you for sharing this story with me !
I saw this happening from 9:00 am today !
– Thyaga
LOL.
It makes me think of The Truman Show Motion Picture,
when they cut the feed….
Don’t worry for their loss of money… They’ll be fine !
Could it be related to work being done on the new video store mentioned here http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/77486
It’s back now and I was able to order my new Powershot. Granted they must have lost some money during such an outage but if people just check back later and order later then the impact might be smaller than I first expected.
“Today’s outage makes you wonder whether the company will be able to scale.”
(apologies to http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....irst-time/ )
Last December, my account froze for 3 weeks and the only way I got it fixed after calling the call center (waste of time) was to email a friend I know who works there and it took him a week to get someone to fix it.
My wife and I have been trying to contact Amazon for over a week, since we could not purchase through the site at all. We got some generic responses, and ended up purchasing somewhere else. I knew this story was coming…
David: Account froze for 3 weeks and no one fixed it for a week.
rasterbator: couldn’t purchase from the site and couldn’t get a response for over a week.
What happend to Amazon.com’s vision of “The most customer centric company in the world”?
I happened to be shopping on both Amazon.com *and* Target.com when the outage hit (sometime around 12:30 CST). Both sites were down. Then Target came up, but shopping cart on Target.com was down until Amazon.com squared itself away. So bear in mind that the outage had more impact than just Amazon.com. Target.com was down and I think they do store fronts for other onliners as well.
-pj
According to workers at the Amazon distribution centre in Fernley Nevada, their internal ordering system, which obviously shares the same backend as the company’s public sites , was down for two hours yesterday and still performing weakly throughout the day so whatever the problem was/is it cut very deeply into Amazon’s operations. Its pretty amazing that this online retail giant had no effective real time ‘fall back’ system in place and I suspect we’ll see a few Amazon data management jobs appearing on Crunchboard in the coming days……
Incidentally, all Amazon workers - even the guys who drive the fork lift trucks - are required to sign contracts prohibiting them from working for e-bay for 18 months after they leave the company. What’s that about?
it was down briefly yesterday afternoon–I got that error message three times and hit refresh many times. But yesterday evening when I got home I was able to get on the site just fine.
OMG, can AMAZON scale?!
Does anyone know if their S3 API was down as well? That would have brought down lots more sites that depend on it.
I guess you shouldn’t be doing a DNS change at 11am PST when your address is amazon.com…
Perhaps a flawed Ajax implementation?
http://searchwebservices.techt.....41,00.html
Remember MySpace?
Hmmmm - yes, a DNS configuration cock up would explain the email gateways going down as well. I’ve seen that sort of thing happen before. So, does anyone know if it was indeed a DNS issue?
(Sadly, this sort of story gets my network geek juices flowing - and who am I to speculate almost a week after the event!)
again today
We’re sorry!
An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed. We apologize for the inconvenience.
on the Amazon.com home page.