Amazon.com Inc. went down this afternoon, starting at approximately 1:45 p.m. Central time, according to an alert from web site monitoring service Pingdom. The outage lasted 46 minutes, it said.
Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
Consumers visiting the Amazon.com home page initially saw this message: “The website is currently unavailable as we make some improvements to our service.” Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
By 1:30 p.m. Central, the message was changed to this:
“Oops!
We’re very sorry, but we’re having trouble doing what you just asked us to do. Please give us another chance–click the Back button on your browser and try your request again. Or start from the beginning on our homepage.”
“AlertBot is currently reporting a Time-Out error, meaning we are able to connect but Amazon.com is failing to load,” says Justin Noll, director of client experience for the site monitoring firm. “The issue began with connectivity errors, meaning AlertBot wasn’t even able to connect to Amazon’s servers.”
In May, Amazon.com went down for less than 10 minutes.
According to the new Top 500 Guide, Amazon’s site availability is 99.92%, with its web site response time at 2.95 seconds. Consumers on average spent 7 minutes and 15 seconds there per visit.