August 19, 2013- Amazon.com went down around 1:55 pm CDT and is still offline. To test the current status of Amazon from worldwide locations run our free Instant Website Test.
This Amazon outage is affecting more than the Amazon.com homepage, as it’s subsidiary retail sites, such as audible.com, are also unavailable. (Dotcom-Monitor has tested and verified that audible web servers are down, however their media servers appears to be functioning correctly (downloads are still available)). According to Dotcom-Monitor testing – and a variety of media outlets, such as MarketWatch, the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times – the Amazon outage was down until approximately 2:33 pm CDT. The outage for the large online retailer comes on the heels of the highly visible NYTimes outage on Wednesday Aug. 14. The NYTimes outage has been described as an “internal issue” however there was some unsubstantiated speculation that a NYTimes DNS outage had occurred. Based on testing during the NYTimes outage, Dotcom-Monitor did not see a DNS issue.
As of 2:50 pm CDT Amazon had not commented publicly on the nature of the Amazon outage. Amazon’s Amazon has suffered outages in the past, notably the Amazon Web Services (AWS) system experience a massive Easter holiday outage in 2011, and a Christmas Eve outage in 2012. AWS also has outage on June 14 and June 29 tied to power outages. The AWS status page did not show service disruption for today’s Aug. 19 outage.
Amazon retail customers received an error message:
“We’re sorry! 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. In the meantime, please note that if you were trying to make a purchase, your order has not been placed. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Amazon’s Canada website – Amazon.ca – was also affected by the outage.
Testing of the Amazon outage from worldwide locations indicates the Amazon servers were not available.
Our testing returned a 10054: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host error.
Error captured with Dotcom-Monitor’s instant browser test.
A 10054 error message occurs when a connection is aborted and there is no tcp disconnection handshake (fin, fin ack, ack). Instead, a rst (reset) flag is sent. A reset flag aborts the connection and is sent when:
– A device is suddenly stopped, rebooted, or loses its network connection.
– The device uses a “hard close”.
– A “half-open connection” state occurs.
A half-open connection occurs when one device does not receive acknowledgement of the data it has sent. Or, if it receives acknowledgement for an unrecognized sequence, or ack number, it will send a rst flag to reset the connection. A half-open connection can be caused by a variety of reasons, including a mis-configured proxy/firewall, or network quality issues resulting in too many dropped packets.
