Data Center Knowledge

Amazon Web Site Down

Posted By Rich Miller On June 6, 2008 @ 3:36 pm In Amazon | Comments Disabled

Amazon.com’s main web site experienced downtime this afternoon, with the company saying it is “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.” Other requests are returning “We’re sorry! An error occurred when we tried to process your request.” As of 3:50 p.m. Eastern, the site appears to be back up. Here’s the official update from Amazon:
The Amazon retail site was down for approximately 2 hours earlier today (beginning around 10:25) – and we’re bringing the site back up. Amazon’s systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible. Amazon’s web services were not affected nor were our international sites.

While many bloggers are experiencing surprise about the downtime, Amazon has had outages before, including downtime in August 2006 [1], July 2005 and December 2004 [2]. CNet [3] reports that 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.

About Rich Miller [4]

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

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URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/06/06/amazon-web-site-down/

URLs in this post:

[1] August 2006: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,210364,00.html

[2] December 2004: http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2403/041208amazonoutage/

[3] CNet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html

[4] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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