Amazon suffers U.S. outage on Friday

Update 3:22 p.m. Amazon has declared the outage over. For details, check our follow-up posting. Updated 12:43 p.m. PDT with further details, including partial site recovery.

Keynote Systems showed Amazon.com's availability drop from nearly 100 percent down to 10 percent or lower at 10:21 a.m. PDT Friday.

(Credit: Keynote Systems)

Amazon.com was inaccessible to many U.S. visitors for more than an hour and a half Friday.

The site went offline completely by 10:21 a.m. PDT, but efforts to restore the site appeared to be taking effect about noon, said Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site responsiveness. As of 12:45 p.m., the site was working intermittently, with many product pages functioning but others still broken.

"At noon PDT, we started to see the site getting better," said Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote. "We are seeing about 70 percent availability."

One-off outages are no fun, but sustained problems can be a serious problem. eBay suffered outages in 1999 that outraged users and sent the stock down, and even a backup system didn't ward off more problems in 2002.

And for major commerce sites, the problem can have ripple effects. Both Amazon and eBay provide a commercial foundation used by many partners and entrepreneurs.

Expensive problems
Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute. (To be fair, those figures don't include revenue from other sources such as search or contextual advertisements or Amazon Web Services.)

Of course, money lost can be money gained for a competitor. A Sony PlayStation 3 promotion with the Metal Gear Solid 4 game went on sale at 10 a.m. PDT, according to some CNET News.com readers. Another reader went to BuyDig.com to buy a birthday present.

"Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" was the message that appeared when Amazon customers across the country attempted to use the site.

Amazon posted an apology placeholder page for broken links.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Representatives of the company haven't responded to requests for comment.

Amazon sites outside the United States appear to be working, including those in China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Amazon Web Services unaffected
It appears Amazon Web Services such as the S3 storage and EC2 computing services still are functioning, at least for some customers, though the AWS page at Amazon.com isn't working.

"S3 and EC2 continue to function for us as normal," said Don MacAskill, chief executive of photo-sharing site Smugmug. Mashery.com CEO Oren Michels, who uses AWS for several functions and who has several customers who use AWS, reported no problems Friday.

Customers who need to get to their AWS pages can follow a direct link, Amazon said.

The security group WebSense concluded the Amazon problems are "not security related" as far as it's aware. Arbor Networks Chief Technology Officer Jose Nazario was more cautious, though: "I've got nothing on it as to why or what happened. I'm not sure if it's an attack or service outage via failures on their end or what."

What's your theory on the cause of the Amazon.com outage?

News.com staff writers Greg Sandoval, Rafe Needleman, and Robert Vamosi contributed to this report.

[tamade-ganinia]

started at 10:30am and its now 10:46am and I still cant access it.

[ibeetle]

It is obvious that Amazon has shut down their site to restructure it to keep up with the high demand come Monday when the new iPhone goes on sale.
In fact I saw a report that the entire internet except those that sell iPhones will completely shut down; Even all retailers except Apple stores and AT&T stores will close for business Monday.

[darthgerber]

11:00AM and still down...

[Dyp]

2pm in the east coast and still not accessible

@ibeetle: funny.

[ChicoJones]

The amazon.com website is still available by using the https protocol, such as: https://www.amazon.com/.


Thanks.
Chico "goz" Jones

[PS3Gamer_MGS4]

This is all over the PS3 forums. The pre-order for the Metal Gear Solid 4 - 80GB PS3 bundle went on sale a few minutes before Amazon went down.

[KEtheredge87]

This might be pure coincidence, but Amazon opened their pre-order option for the 80GB Metal Gear Solid 4 Playstation 3 bundle at 10AM Pacific time. Their site shut down soon after that. Perhaps they were flooded with anxious MGS fans trying to get their 80GB PS3's?

[RHartzell]

ChicoJones: Visiting the secure version of the site doesn't help much -- all the links on the home page go to nonsecure pages that don't display.

[enlighten86]

It's more than just Amazon - there are problems with other sites as well it seems. I've been getting Page Can Not be Displayed errors all morning.

[Dead Soulman]

I was wondering why I couldn't connect past the front page. Wow, this is crazy. 2:36pm. It seems to be coming back by sections.

[64bprophet]

Hy, did you see? Amazon.com has a job opening for a Systems Administrator... I wonder what happened to the old one?

[thesplintercell]

it's ironic that this made the news....i was online to buy my fiance a navigation system for her birthday and couldn't get on amazon to do it. even worse, i found the same unit @ buydig for 10 bucks cheaper than amazon, so i just snagged it from there.

[mhinnewyork]

As of 2:38PM ET, Amazon is still down.

[taotaobabe]

at least gold box works

http://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox/ref=cs_top_nav_gb27

[Jamie_Foster]

Don't they use Linux/Apache. Maybe Windows Server/IIS is better engineered than people want to admit.

[DigitalSnowman]

I don't think this has to do with the release of Metal Gear pre-orders (sorry, PS3 just isn't popular enough) or "preparing for the new iPhone" - no business will take their site down for HOURS during peak sales time during the day without so much as a "sorry, we're doing maintenance" page for the sale of a single product. These things might be popular in the eyes of the people interested in them, but the rest of the public isn't biting its nails in anticipation of a new cell phone or video game.

I'm speculating that this is a routing issue with one of Amazon's top-tier data pipe providers. All it takes is one person to flip the wrong switch or update a routing table incorrectly and all of a sudden a site becomes inaccessible. Changes in routing info take time to spread across the internet, so the problem may be resolved, but all of the downstream routers need to update their info to transfer the data correctly again. It looks like Amazon will be buying a backup data pipe from a completely different provider for their systems in the future.

[hackian]

Their web service status page shows these services seem to be up...
http://status.aws.amazon.com/

[StickyC]

Maybe they're jealous of Twitter's recent headlines?
They say there's no such thing as bad PR...

[tamade-ganinia]

its only the front end as far as i could tell. I've been working on the sellercentral part of amazon doing inventory and orders when I noticed that all links to the front is unaccessible.

[Dead Soulman]

I was wondering why I couldn't connect past the front page. Wow, this is crazy. 2:36pm. It seems to be coming back by sections.