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Amazon's homepage blinks

Online retailer was offline for a short period

The homepage of Amazon.com was down this afternoon for a short period.

The homepage was inaccessible around 3 p.m. ET, and possibly before but appeared to be back in operation well within that hour.

Direct links to product pages seemed to be working during the outage.

The only thing visitors saw on the homepage during the incident was this message: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable"

Amazon's large hosting business, Amazon Web Services, reported normal operations throughout. The problem appear limited to the retail site's homepage.

The problem in accessing the site was widely noticed in social media. Amazon officials were not immediately available for comment.

Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed. His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.

See more by Patrick Thibodeau on Computerworld.com.

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