Amazon Down For An Hour And Counting (Updated)

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Michael Arrington

TechCrunch.com
Friday, June 6, 2008; 5:09 PM

The Amazon outage, first noticed by Twitter users at as early as 10:24 am PST this morning (I'd link to Twitter except that it's down), has gone on for an hour now. It's not necessarily news when a startup has minor downtime, but Amazon loses big revenue for every minute they aren't out there selling.

My PR contacts there aren't answering the phone, and a message to the main PR number hasn't yet been returned. At least their web services appear to be humming. An AWS outage in February took an untold number of startups with it.

Update: Looks like www.amazon.com works now, but only sometimes. According to Twitter the site first came back up (sporadically) around 12:10 PM PST. Based on an average loss of $31,000 per minute, Amazon just theoretically lost out on around $3,286,000.

Update 2: Email from Amazon PR:

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.