Amazon.com's US site KO'd!

Assailant unknown

By Dan Goodin • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 6th June 2008 19:13 GMT

Join our expert panel in discussing application security

Updated Amazon.com has been knocked out of service by an undiagnosed glitch that's making it impossible for people to access the website.

At a few minutes before noon, California time, we were still getting an error that said only "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" when trying to visit the online shopping site. The message has been greeting people for more than an hour. Amazon sites in the UK, France, Germany and elsewhere were still accessible.

There's no telling how much Amazon.com is losing every second its main website is out of commission, and company representatives aren't taking calls to help us tally the amount. The company says here that it's "experiencing some issues on aws.amazon.com" but that its developer forums, support center and resource center pages are available using this link.

Both the S3 and EC2 services are working normally, Amazon indicated.

The company's stock price was down more than 4 percent amid the uncertainty, higher than the overall market downfall.

Update

After fits and starts, the site is available again, though that seems to mean different things to different people. Reg reader Martin, for example, now gets a page (see screenshot below) that says he's most likely a bot and is therefore being blocked. Go figure.

"No, I've never run a bot of any sort, I'm just a regular Amazon punter who was about to look for a spare laptop adapter," he writes. The San Francisco-based reader adds: "PS, right-clicking the image of the dog provides says that the image is located at: http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/misc/sadie.jpg So I guess the dog is called Sadie?" ®

See what The Register's experts have to say on application security