Amazon Suffers Unexplained Website Outage

Amazon has confirmed its services are back online after many of the company’s top websites suffered an unexplained outage overnight.

The fault, which appears to have affected the main Amazon.com website, as well as Amazon Web Services and Amazon Prime Music, occurred last night (late morning in the US), leaving many customers unable to carry out their orders.

Amazon has not responded to our queries about the issue, however CNBC reported that the Amazon Help Twitter account said it was working to resolve an issue in a Spanish-language tweet.

Error

The outage was first spotted around lunchtime US time, when users began receiving repeated error messages when trying to complete their orders.

“We’re sorry! An error occurred when we tried to process your request,” the message read. “Rest assured, we’re working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The problem now appears to have been resolved, although Amazon has not yet confirmed the cause.

The downtime is not the first instance of Amazon’s website being affected by issues that have stopped its customers in areas all around the world from completing their shopping.

Last February, the company’s UK and European websites all went down several times during the course of one evening.

The outage event also affected users of Amazon Prime in the UK, who reported denial of service, and even some apps on Amazon’s own Fire Phone were allegedly failing to open because of the outage.

Prior to this, the American and Canadian Amazon websites, as well as Amazon Web Services also suffered several high-profile outages in August 2013, although details on what caused these issues were not forthcoming.

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