Amazon.com Taking The Day Off?
from the taking-a-breather dept
Around 10:30 am this morning, Amazon.com seemed to have disappeared from the internet, popping up a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" message, which suggests a rather catastrophic failure. The fact that it's been doing that for about an hour now, and there still hasn't even been a "sorry we're down" type message to replace it certainly can't be a good sign. Other parts of Amazon's business do appear to be working (I was able to login to my Amazon s3 account, for example), but still, this doesn't seem like the type of Friday that Amazon was probably expecting. Update: Amusingly, Amazon is referring to this as an "unplanned event." Why, that makes it sound fun!Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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amazon.ca has no trouble however.
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Web server?
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Pepsistuff kinda workin
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Still Down
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I have it under control
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Domain Redirect?
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Hmm, I wonder...
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Re: Hmm, I wonder...
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I got
An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we're already working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly.
If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
on the Amazon.com home page
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Still down
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It is up!
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Inconceivable!
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Now Amazon Thinks...
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Re: Now Amazon Thinks...
The humans are dead
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Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds. Lawrence...!
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We're sorry!
You have been denied access to this feature because we believe you violated the terms, conditions, rules, guidelines or policies of our site in the past. If you believe we have taken this action in error, you may contact us at ad-help-us@amazon.com.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why am I seeing this page?
A: This page is usually shown when we believe that the request is coming from a robot or other automated source of requests. If you are not a robot please contact us immediately by emailing ad-help-us@amazon.com and we will reinstate your access to our website.
Q: How can I operate a robot and not get this page?
A: We understand that there are many legitimate reasons for robots to access our website. We are happy to work with people trying to create robots so that they may do so safely and efficiently. If you are operating a robot and you are seeing this page we'd love to hear from you so that we may better understand your use case and help you to achieve your goals. Please email ad-help-us@amazon.com and we'll help you out - seriously, we aren't mad at you.
Q: What are some general tips for people writing robots?
A: First, you should see if there is a better method to get the information you need. For example, Amazon Web Services provides a rich set of APIs to retrieve the information displayed on many of Amazon's web pages (prices, reviews, sales rank, etc). Because Amazon Web Services exposes a stable set of APIs that provide structured data it is often much easier to retrieve information via this method. You'll be able to find out more about Amazon Web Services at http://aws.amazon.com. Second, you should identify your robot using a unique user agent string that provdes a way we can get in touch with you if necessary. For example, here is Google's user agent string Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html).
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PS3
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The reason
Just in case you were wondering what the most likely cause is!
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Re: The reason
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unplanned event?
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Up again
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The Scientologists Were Right
You are really a robot, and Amazon knows it.
You now owe me $375,000 for the enlightenment which I have just delivered to your consciousness. I accept cash, securities, and cash.
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