Amazon site hit by brief outage

The site went down about 1:40 p.m. PT and the outage lasted roughly 30 minutes. Most of the company's stores--including books, music and electronics--were inaccessible to customers. Users could still access the company's zShops and auction areas.

Amazon's home page read: "We're sorry but our Books, Music, DVD & Video, Toys & Games, Electronics & Software, and Home Improvement stores are closed temporarily. We expect to be back soon."

The note added, "We apologize for any inconvenience, and thank you for your patience."

Amazon spokesman Bill Curry attributed the outage to problems stemming from scheduled site maintenance, but declined to give further details.

"These are complex systems and sometimes they hiccup," Curry said, repeating comments made following previous outages.

This is the third outage for Amazon this month. The Net retailer suffered two separate downtimes on Nov. 4, including a 30-minute outage.

Most Popular

Latest tech news headlines

• Daily tidbits: MySpace ate my degree; Mogulus goes pro, and more

  Posted in Webware by Don Reisinger

  December 5, 2008 9:33 AM PST

• Microsoft kicks off the year of the audit

  Posted in The Open Road by Matt Asay

  December 5, 2008 8:04 AM PST

• Times are tough, but tech companies don't need to suffer

  Posted in The Digital Home by Don Reisinger

  December 5, 2008 7:59 AM PST

• See all headlines

Markets

Market news, charts, SEC filings, and more

Related quotes

Dow Jones Industrials (-1.33%) -111.42 8,264.82

S&P 500 (-1.21%) -10.19 835.03

NASDAQ (-0.86%) -12.43 1,433.13

CNET TECH (-2.04%) -21.34 1,023.67

  Symbol Lookup