Amazon.com Goes Down (Now Up)

Amazon.com was down this afternoon for about two hours until 3:20pm ET. Reports had it that the outage was due to an upgrade of the company’s website but no further details were provided.

During the midst of the downtime, Amazon posted this at the Amazon Services Seller Forums:

“We are currently investigating an issue that has impacted the availability of the Amazon.com website. As a part of this resolution, some customers may experience error messages that indicate that their access to the Amazon web site has been blocked for various reasons. These reasons my not be directly related to the customer’s account. Access to the website will return when this technical issue is resolved.”

Earlier, rumors circulated among security professionals that Amazon.com’s load-balancing system was hit with distributed denial-of-service attack.