Someone turned off the lights on the Amazon home page Thursday afternoon, as the retailer experienced an outage of just under an hour.
The home page was offline for 49 minutes and cost the retailer and its merchants $5.7 million, according to news reports. Bloomberg reports the outage began as early as 2:44 p.m. Eastern Time.
A spokesperson for the online retailer tells TechCrunch that during the outage, Amazon’s mobile sites, international sites and other Web pages were not affected. Neither were Amazon Web Services.
Still, news of the outage got people talking on social media sites. Jen Guevin, a managing editor of CNET, notes on her Twitter account that “like anti-smoking commercials make smokers crave a cigarette, news of this Amazon outage is only making me want to buy something.”
Mike Oryszack writes on his Twitter account that the outage was bad for the economy. “Where do consumers spend when Amazon is down?” he asked.
Amazon confirmed the outage but did not say what caused it. The home page is now back up.
