Another Amazon outage, this time hitting U.K, too

These availability charts from Keynote Systems show Amazon's U.K. site, top, dropping largely off the Net, then gradually recovering. The U.S. site, the lower chart, showed more intermittent problems.

(Credit: Keynote Systems)

Amazon.com's Web site was offline again Monday, another significant interruption of services after a two-hour outage Friday.

As of 10:08 PDT on Friday, Amazon's main Web site showed the "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error message that also showed on Friday.

The e-commerce giant's Friday outage affected its Amazon.com site used by U.S. visitors. Monday's outage appeared to affect its U.K. site as well.

Pages on Amazon's U.S. and U.K. Web sites sporadically showed an error message like this Monday, as well one saying Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Update 10:26 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com is back, though the U.K. site still appears down to me. On Friday, the site was intermittently available, though, so it does not appear to be out of the woods yet.

Update 10:40 a.m. PDT: The "We're sorry!" error page that showed up Friday also is appearing on some other pages. The site is working for me, but not for an East Coast colleague.

Update 10:47 a.m. PDT: Amazon.co.uk now works for me again, though with sporadic errors on product pages.

Update 10:59 a.m. PDT: The company still hasn't responded to my requests for comment, but Amazon acknowledged problems on a forum for those who sell goods at the site: "We are currently experiencing an issue that is causing site performance issues. Our engineers are actively engaged on resolving this issue, and we will continue to provide updates until service has been restored," the company said.

Update 11:07 a.m. PDT: I'm getting intermittent errors again at the main pages, and some product pages of Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. So it's clear that as with Friday, recovery is a fits-and-starts affair, even an hour after the problem began.

Update 11:58 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com and most of Amazon.co.uk are working for me. One curiosity: when the site was really struggling, it was rare to even get the "Sorry!" error page.

Outages are bad, but as eBay learned nearly a decade ago, multiple outages are worse. Over its history so far, though, Amazon generally has a reputation for reliability.

I added a graph from GrabPerf that shows the recent errors and slow-response times of Amazon.com.

Update 12:28 p.m. PDT: Amazon has posted an "issue resolved" update to its seller community forum on Monday--but it's not about Monday's problem. Instead, it's just got old news, saying that on Friday, Amazon resolved the problem it was having on Friday. Still no word from the company about the second glitch.

Update 1:20 p.m. PDT: Keynote Systems, which monitors the availability of Web sites browsed from PCs and mobile devices, confirmed that Monday's outage hit the U.S. and U.K. sites.

The U.S. outage was a double whammy, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations. The first problem showed from 10:03 a.m. to 10:23 a.m. PDT, with site availability dropping to about 30 percent. A second, less severe problem occurred from 10:56 a.m. to 11:09 a.m. PDT, he said.

The U.K. glitch was a single, longer-lasting outage that began at 10:06 a.m. and dropped the site to about 30 percent availability. The site gradually recovered over a period of about two hours to 50 percent, 70 percent, and now 98 percent.

As with Friday, White fingered human error as the most likely culprit, not a remote attack.

"It stills look like some type of user error or configuration glitch," he said. "The data just doesn't demonstrate any kind of network-level attack."

Update 1:40 p.m. PDT: Amazon confirmed the problem, though it didn't share much detail: "Some customers reported intermittent problems accessing Amazon retail Web sites on Monday morning. However, we are working to resolve the issues, and Amazon's Web services are not affected."

Update 2:50 p.m. PDT: A reader and I just got more timeouts on the U.S. site, with not even an error message showing. Things still aren't totally up to snuff, apparently.

Also, I added some nicer graphs from Keynote.

[gsmiller88]

I tried accessing the site around that time and it was just really slow for me, but has since picked back up.

[notjusta-pretty-face]

I wanted to say I think you're impressive. I could not get onto Amazon on Friday & had trouble today as well. That's why I did a google search & found your post. Thank you!

[someguy999]

maybe it is management, the site for some reason now is starting to go down... and the same person who was in charge of the Vista (BrianV) is now managing Amazon's ecommerce platform.... interesting...

[joestrummer1]

citibank called me today. they've had to issue a new card to me because a "large retailer" had their system hacked and they "accessed millions of credit card numbers".

not trying to spread rumors, but...

[Shankland]

Amazon told me this is purely a site outage issue--no customer data released: "Customers were simply unable to access the site -- this was not a security issue."

[hxiong]

yeah it's not workin for me. just did a search and got nothin.

[t8]

Ha ha. Coincidence or not?
Regardless, an Ex Windows worker working in E commerce just isn't right.

[Wookiee-1138]

It's the MGS pre-orders.

[Slim_Q]

it's having issues. Again. Getting the same "We're Sorry" message at 23:05 EDT.

[Lawryll]

Hey...this is Mr. Valentine's department! From Vista to this.Hmmm... really important, critical things not performing as expected seem to follow Brian wherever he goes. Coincidence?

[Lerianis]

What in the world is going on here? It seems like Amazon is having 'rolling blackouts' in countries where their 'server farms' are pretty separate..... sounds like someone is trying to hack their system or do a DDoS attack on them, and is actually succeeding.

[bjuly06]

It is June 11, 2008 and I am unable to log into Amazon.com. Is anyone else still having the problem. It was really strange because I was in the middle of having a dispute with a seller who sent me a defective printer.

Give me a break. Anyone over here spend anytime at all in enterprise IT? AWS service levels (or for that matter the service levels of most SaaS/PaaS providers) leave them in the dust and are delivered at a fraction of the cost of on-premise/in-house IT. As for Brian V. I would suggest that he has had a lot more successes than failures. Which is a lot more than most of us can say.