Cloud Computing: Amazon E-Retail Down For Hour On Thursday

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

For about an hour starting around 11:30 a.m. Pacific, the Amazon.com retail site was inaccessible to customers. Attempts to access the site were met with a http://1.1 message on an otherwise white and unadorned screen. The site appeared to be operating normally again about 12:45 p.m. Pacific. Several customers noted the outage on Facebook and Twitter. At 12:24 p.m. Pacific, The San Francisco technology reporting site, GigaOm, noted: "Amazon is down; Yes, you read that right."

Security blogger George V. Hulme noted about 12:30 p.m. on Facebook: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." Queries submitted to Amazon Web Services and Amazon.com public relations personnel did not result in any immediate response. Amazon Web Services appeared to be up and running during that time. The AWS home page appeared on cue and key services, such as the Heroku cloud running on AWS, were still up during the period Amazon.com was inaccessible.