Amazon.com experiences hours-long outage

Amazon.com experienced a widespread outage on Tuesday that lasted, at least for many customers, more than three hours and displayed blank or partial pages instead of product listings.

By mid-afternoon, Amazon's home page was devoid of any product photographs and showed only a list of categories on the left of the screen. Searching for items often didn't work, and customers' shopping carts and saved item lists were temporarily displayed as empty.

At an annual revenue of nearly $27 billion, Amazon faces a potential loss of an average of $51,400 a minute when it's site is offline. Amazon shares closed down 7.8 percent, a sharper fall than the Nasdaq index.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20009241-93.html