The site outage lasted less than 10 minutes this morning.

When a giant stumbles, it’s hard not to notice. Amazon.com Inc. today experienced a brief outage that left consumers trying to access the e-commerce site from the front door—that is, via Amazon.com—unable to do so for about eight minutes.

The site outage lasted from 9:45 a.m. until 9:53 am EST today, says Justin Noll, director of client experience at AlertBot, a web site monitoring service of InfoGenius Inc. Visitors saw a page citing an HTTP 503 Server Unavailable error, he says.

“This means Amazon’s network was able to respond but unable to deliver the web site due to temporary overloading or maintenance,” he says.

Amazon did not provide immediate comment. Shoppers during the outage could still access Amazon via other ways, such as through paid search ads on Google. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

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