Amazon Outage

(Update: service back late in the afternoon) Amazon has been suffering an ongoing shortage that has both affected its main business as well as hurt its Kindle e-book reader, according to user reports. The outage began earlier this afternoon and has left Amazon's main page nearly, blank, with only a "service unavailable" message at the front. Kindle users in turn note an inability to access the company's site for downloading e-books.

Users of Amazon's S3 Internet storage service, which includes Pownce and other Internet businesses, currently claim to have access to the feature, while visitors to some of the online retailer's country-specific sites, including Amazon Canada and Amazon UK, are also working properly. Amazon has yet to provide an official explanation for the outage, though no reports have surfaced of any malicious intent behind the service downtime.

by MacNN Staff