Amazon.com suffers outage: Nearly $5M down the drain?

Amazon.com, the multi-billion online retail website, experienced an outage of unknown proportions on Thursday afternoon.

Rumblings of an Amazon.com outage began popping up on Twitter at about 2:40 PM ET. Multiple attempts to access the site around 3:15 PM ET on Thursday were met with the message: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." By 3:30 PM ET the site appeared to be back online for at least some users.

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Amazon officials have said that the biggest customer of the company's cloud division - Amazon Web Services (AWS) - is Amazon.com. AWS has experienced a variety of outages during the past three years, but usually the Amazon.com retail site is not impacted. An October 2012 Amazon Elastic Block Storage outage knocked out customers such as Reddit and an outage on Christmas Eve in 2012 brought down streaming movie service Netflix, but not Amazon.com. In this case, Amazon.com appears to be down, but the status report page for AWS's cloud division does not show any issues.

The website www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com confirmed that Amazon.com is down on Thursday afternoon.

Amazon.com's latest earnings report showed that the company makes about $10.8 billion per quarter, or about $118 million per day and $4.9 million per hour.

Twitter, the social network site, experienced issues earlier on Thursday as well, but service seemed to be restored by early afternoon.

Check back to NetworkWorld.com for additional information on Amazon.com's outage as it becomes available.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.