Amazon website goes down Monday afternoon

It seems that some of the biggest players in the industry are suffering from a recent rash of problems. Last week Microsft’s Outlook.com  email service suffered a rather long downtime that lasted for a good portion of the day and into two more days. Then Google had a similar, but much shorter outage that resulted in a forty-percent dip in web traffic according to analytics firm GoSquared.

Today it is the turn of Amazon, as the site mysteriously went offline for thirty minutes. Visitors encountered a “Oops! We’re very sorry,” alongside a “500 Service Unavailable Error” report when attempting to access the online retailer. The outage apparently only affected the US and Canada sites.

Microsoft has since reported the Outlook.com problem was caused by a failure in its “caching” temporary storage service. It said this “resulted in a flood of traffic that our services did not handle properly”. It is still too early for any information on the cause for today’s Amazon failure.