Amazon.com Goes Down, Takes Break From Retail Biz











Amazon hosted a new kind of online door-crasher sale on Thursday. That is to say, its front door crashed.


For about a half-hour, starting just before noon Pacific time on Thursday, the main Amazon.com webpage was inaccessible to web surfers.


Visitors were greeted with a white page and the error: “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.”



The problem appeared to affect only the front page of Amazon.com. Other pages on the site were accessible here at Wired.


Others reported Amazon coming back within a few minutes of the outage, but at Wired’s offices in San Francisco, the site’s main page was inaccessible for a half-hour. Online, others reported similar problems. Amazon couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.


It was an unusual outage for Amazon.com, but over the past year, the company has endured several high profile crashes at Amazon Web Services, where it sells online computing power to companies such as Netflix. Amazon’s web services — including a critical Elastic Load Balancing service that keeps webservers from being overwhelmed — knocked Netflix offline in June and again on Christmas Eve.


That prompted this zinger from Netflix Engineer Adrian Cockcroft Thursday as the outage was happening, “Maybe the guy who broke the ELB got moved sideways to a new job in Amazon retail.” At least part of Amazon’s own site now runs on AWS, but it’s unclear how much.






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