Amazon's homepage blinks

Computerworld - The homepage of Amazon.com was down this afternoon for less than an hour, the online retailer said.

The homepage was inaccessible around 3 p.m. ET, and possibly before but appeared to be back in operation well within that hour.

"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," Amazon spokesman Ty Rogers said in an email to Computerworld.

Direct links to product pages seemed to be working during the outage.

The only thing visitors saw on the homepage during the incident was this message: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable"

Amazon's large hosting business, Amazon Web Services, reported normal operations throughout.

The problem in accessing the site was widely noticed in social media.

Based on its quarterly earnings, Network World estimated that an hour-long outage could cost the company as much as $5 million.

Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.

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