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After a considerable outage that started around 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time, Amazon.com's homepage is now back up and still trying to get someone, anyone, to buy a Kindle. Shortly after the outage, the company issued a short statement in the forums for 3rd party sellers titled "Amazon Un-Planned Event" — not such an unusual occurrence, apparently, but rarely of this magnitude:

We are currently investigating an issue that has impacted the availability of the Amazon.com website. Engineers are actively engaged in resolving this issue and we will provide an update once the issue is resolved.

According to our commenters, Amazon's web services such as EC2, S3 and SQS experienced no outages, so the problem didn't take down dozens of startups with it. Shame.