back to article Amazon DISAPPEARS from internet

Amazon.com has dropped offline*, amid widespread reports of trouble in the underlying Amazon Web Services infrastructure cloud. The problems began at about 11.50am Pacific Time on Monday in California, and Twitter quickly flooded with reports of people having trouble accessing both Amazon.com and the Amazon Web Services cloud …

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  1. ratfox
    Black Helicopters

    Time to don the tinfoil hats

    First Google, now Amazon… Coincidence? YOU DECIDE!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Time to don the tinfoil hats

      Microsoft has a big outage between those too.

      Facebook's turn next, I guess!

      1. Tom 260
        Terminator

        Re: Time to don the tinfoil hats

        BBC say Intel's support pages & the NYT also had some downtime...

        Personally I think it's just what happens when all the sysadmins go on holiday! Well, either that or NSA's new Skynet program is usurping each site one by one, learning what a waste of time humanity is.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Time to don the tinfoil hats

        Only about 10 people noticed the Microsoft outage though and nine of those people worked for Microsoft. Even Ballmer didn't notice.

      3. Katie Saucey
        Thumb Up

        Re: Time to don the tinfoil hats

        Facebook's turn next, I guess!

        And nothing of value was lost.....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Time to don the tinfoil hats

      It's not really up to me to decide the causes of events that have occurred.

    3. Chris_Maresca
      Mushroom

      NSA upgrading it's systems...

      ... nothing to worry about.

    4. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Black Helicopters

      I'm going to go for a whole new level of tinfoil hattedness

      First the NSA announced that they were going to fire 90% of their sysadmins and now service levels at its front companies have gone down the pan.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Time to don the tinfoil hats

      IMDB was out for a while too.

  2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    Not worried

    We got rid of 90% of our sysadmins for security reasons and put everythign in the cloud

  3. Dr Who

    In Google we trust! God bless Amazonica!

  4. deains

    An Amazon spokesperson was unavailable for comment. When we questioned him, he returned a 503 error message.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Next it will be the satellites, then ships will reign down on us attacking major cities.

    Thank $DEITY we have Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum to save us.

    1. Anomalous Cowshed

      No, it is not Bruce Willis and Jeff Goldblum

      The mighty Register, that David among Goliaths, and its army of fiery commentating avengers, will save us from the destruction wrought upon the Internet by the forces of evil with their Error 503 and Error-what-have-you weapons of mass unavailability!

      1. Khaptain Silver badge

        Re: No, it is not Bruce Willis and Jeff Goldblum

        Worse still, we might actually be experiencing the wrath off

        ..........drum roll ........

        ........wait for it........

        .........EADON...........

    2. Jonathan Richards 1
      Headmaster

      Homonym hell

      Rain - n., wet stuff that falls out of the sky. Hence vt. to rain (usu. down) upon something

      Reign - vt., to rule over e.g. a kingdom or empire. Hence "a reign of terror", etc.

      Rein - n., a piece of horse-harness, attached to the bit. Hence "rein in", i.e. to limit movement or freedom of action.

      I've lost count of how many times I have seen these three confused.

      1. Shining Wit

        Re: Homonym hell

        homophone, shirley?

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: Homonym hell

          Let's not be homophonic - and don't call me shirley

      2. Martin H Watson

        Re: Homonym hell

        Not so smart... you mean homophone.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oops

    OK so I admit, it was my fault. I tried setting up a VPN connection to AWS and including it as part of my home network Beowulf Cluster. Didn't help much, Crysis still ran like a hog. Something to do with network latencies and then some kind of DNS resolution error?

  7. Don Jefe

    I couldn't access amazon.com from a PC but the mobile app worked fine, from search to order confirmation, and wife says Netflix streaming worked all afternoon. Wonder what really happened.

    1. Lars Silver badge
      Coat

      "Wonder what really happened.". Nothing really, the NSA just run out of space temporally.

      1. an it guy
        Headmaster

        you know, you should not be letting slip that the NSA has access to time-morphing systems.*

        *you meant temporarily rather than temporally

  8. Cliff

    In the meantime

    I bought a paper book on the high street.

    1. Cliff

      Re: In the meantime

      It's got a great shopping paradigm. You put your book in your basket, go to checkout, they take cards, vouchers, even 'cash'. Instant delivery - it's literally in your hands before you even finish the checking out.

      Grabbed a coffee whilst I was there too.

      1. Don Jefe
        Thumb Up

        Re: In the meantime

        I think you've solved the unsolvable issue! The thing that every Internet retailer has attempted to do, but failed: You've envisioned a way to bridge the last mile! Think of the advantages, no shipping fees, no lost packages and the possibility of meeting interesting people!

        You could even make such a system profitable for government by having the retailer collect some sort of service fee based on the value of the goods purchased. You're going to be rich!!!

        1. Ace Rimmer

          Re: In the meantime

          "the possibility of meeting interesting people"

          You plainly don't shop in my town.

          1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

            Re: In the meantime

            If "homicidal maniac" or "mouth breathing pond life" is your idea of interesting, we have a lot in my neighbouring town...

            1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. plrndl

      Re: In the meantime

      Where?

    3. miket82

      Re: In the meantime

      Paper? book? highstreet? What the hell are they?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's what happens when you let the NSA tap into your infrastructure...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      no no

      This is what happens if you resist NSA.

      "That's a nice web2.0rhea business you have there son. Would be a shame if it went down for a while..."

  10. 404
    Terminator

    Black box packet scanners - big ones

    Shoved right into any traffic to those site/services - NSA finally their own co-lo's.

    Next secure form of communication? Laser line of sight? Smoke signals? Wait, EPA would be all over you. Mustn't do that.

    I'm gonna go have a beer, purchased with quarters... sigh.

  11. Will Godfrey Silver badge

    But this is different Amazon has got previous form where major outages are concerned.

  12. IGnatius T Foobar
    FAIL

    EC2 FAIL

    Dunno why anyone would trust their critical computing infrastructure to a bookstore.

    1. Don Jefe
      Happy

      Re: EC2 FAIL

      It's the Internet man, some people trust their money to a Magic The Gathering forum...

      Plus don't forget a bakery in London played a huge role in defining business computing and basic ERP (LEO I) so a bookstore selling tech infrastructure doesn't really sound too strange. Tech history is full of terribly incongruous things.

      *I just up voted you and your downvote vote tally changed, guess I inadvertently downvoted you some time earlier. Apologies.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    Hey! It takes some time to install those NSA taps!

    The NSA--now we know what you read!!

  14. Vociferous

    New type of attack?

    Unless it's embarrassing and/or would really rattle confidence in cloud services, we'll probably hear about it soon.

  15. Mephistro
    Thumb Up

    +1 to the NSA tap hypothesis

    Either that or they are trying very hard to stop the Wikileaks/Snowden encrypted databomb. And failing. :0)

  16. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
  17. jubtastic1
    Big Brother

    No information on any of these outages?

    Are we supposed to infer from this vacuum that it's our elected governments doing totally trustworthy things?

    The more you don't know the safer you are.

  18. Dropper

    I heard..

    They fixed it by turning their computer off and on again..

    1. Brian Miller

      Re: I heard..

      Actually, that's a good way to screw everything up on a large system. If something doesn't support the instantaneous load of EVERYTHING coming up at once, then you'll have a repeated load failover. Imagine 5000 machines coming up at once, and all of them have the same DNS rotation. One DNS is slammed into oblivion, then they all synchronously jump to the next DNS server which is slammed into oblivion, etc. Eventually somebody gets the bright idea of shutting down most of them, and turning them on a few at a time.

      I have no idea what's gone on this time around, though. Good to see it didn't last too long.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    95% sys admins

    and they brought in MSCE sys admins. The first thing they did was reboot the servers...

  20. M. B.

    If El Reg goes down next week...

    ...during VMworld, I will be rather upset at the lack of coverage :(

  21. ecofeco Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Something's up

    What, I don't know, but something is definitely going on.

  22. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
    Holmes

    It's for tax reasons.

    Big boys get asked why they pay so little tax.

    It's because if you make them pay tax, they pick up their ball and go home.

    Will there be a coffee outage next week?

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    During the disruption ...............

    there was an almost 40% drop in the amount of tat being shipped out of China.

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