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Amazon Web Meltdown

At approximately 4PM EST, June 29 2010, Amazon's web services for purchasing items using browsers, the Kindle and iPad/iPhone/Android mobile web apps collapsed.
Written by Jason Perlow, Senior Contributing Writer

At approximately 4PM EST, June 29 2010, Amazon's web services for purchasing items using browsers, the Kindle and iPad/iPhone/Android mobile web apps  collapsed.

This afternoon, I realized that I needed a new 72mm filter for a camera lens I had ordered from Amazon earlier in the day.

I put in the search parameters "72mm filter" and results came up, but whenever I tried to click on them, I would see the above 404 screen in either the Chrome or Firefox browsers. Thinking that perhaps my desktop PC was at fault, I attempted a similar purchase on the iPad.

This yielded an error message from the Amazon.com app, indicating that mobile web services were down.

Just to make sure I wasn't completely crazy, I also tried to purchase e-Books via the Kindle store using the iPad Kindle app, and got the above completely blank Kindle Store home screen.

I was able to successfully search for an author "bourdain" but if you attempt to click on any of the books, they have no links.

[EDIT: Services resumed at approximately 8:30PM EST, for a total outage of approximately four and a half hours.]

As far as I know this is the first major systems failure of Amazon.com that I have seen in a very long time. Is anyone else having problems today? Talk back and let me know.

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