Amazon.co.uk falls off the web

Nothing to see here...

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 31st October 2005 12:19 GMT

Understand how application security is evolving

In brief Amazon's UK site is down at the moment and the company isn't saying what's gone wrong.

A spokesman for Amazon.co.uk told the Reg: "Yes, dot co uk is down at the moment and we are working on a fix." He would not say what the problem is but said the company hoped it would be fixed "shortly".

We'll bring you more on this story when we have it.

Thanks to a Register reader for the tip-off.

UPDATE

Amazon spin doctors got in touch to tell us the site was back up and running at 1.40pm. But they said they6 would rather not talk about what actually happened or to tell us when the site went down.

The spokesman said the problem had been fixed but would not tell us what the problem was.

Fortunately Register readers were not so reticent: one got in touch to say, according to his RSS feed, the site went down at 7.30am UK time. Another pointed out that Amazon.com, amazon.fr and amazon.ca were all down too.

And what caused this disaster? - Amazon "would rather not talk about it" so it's back to our readers. Step forward Steve who emailed us to say: "Problem is also with .com .fr .de and .ca forms of Amazon - all have 207.171... network addresses - clever or what ??"

So was it a hack or a simple mistake? Let us know what you think at the usual address.®

Understand how application security is evolving