Amazon Outage Fails Weekend Shoppers

Amazon UK fell offline last night at about 6pm GMT, leaving thousands of disgruntled shoppers unable to access the retail giant’s website.

Reports currently suggest the site was down across most of Europe as well. Users of Amazon Prime in the UK also reported denial of service, and even apps on Amazon’s own Fire Phone were allegedly failing to open because of the outage.

Service seemed to resume at 7pm GMT, but downdetector.co.uk points to another outage at 10pm GMT which lasted for around an hour. Amazon.com appears to have been unaffected.

‘Very complex’ systems

TechWeekEurope reached out to Amazon UK for comment on the matter. We received the same comment back from Amazon that it had sent out in 2008 when a similar outage occurred.

Amazon UK told TechWeekEurope: “Amazon.co.uk was down for approximately two hours yesterday. The site is back up. Amazon’s systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimise any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible.”

In January, Amazon  confirmed its status as one of the UK’s top retailers thanks to an extremely successful Christmas shopping period that saw it take one in every four pounds spent on entertainment goods.

Figures from Kantar Worldpanel examining the run-up to Christmas have revealed that the online retailer controlled 25.6 percent of the music, games and DVD market during the holiday period.

Tesco came in second position with 14.7 per cent, with HMV in third with 13.9 per cent, showing further proof of the swing from high street to online shopping for many consumers.

HMV was able to gain a high position despite not having a fully operable online site, suggesting the future could be bright for the troubled music retailer.

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