Amazon earlier today experienced an outage of its main Amazon.com homepage that lasted for nearly one hour, the company confirmed today. It is still not explaining what the problem was but TechCrunch understands that it is looking unlikely that any outside group was involved — as would be the case in a hack or DDoS attack. At the time of the outage, Amazon’s mobile sites, other pages, international sites and AWS services serving other websites and businesses were unaffected.
“The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes. Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email.
Visits to the site at the time of the outage were bringing up 503 errors, which sometimes are linked to DDoS attacks or other kinds of overloads. 503 errors can also be linked to maintenance issues. Site outages are never good things but feel particularly shaky when they are linked to e-commerce sites or other places where user data is stored.
The outage happened on the same day that Twitter also experienced intermittent service outages internationally.