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Amazon outage over: Amazon.com back up after 15 minute outage

Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, went dark for about 15 minutes on Monday in a rare outage for many users across the United States and Canada.

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Scott Sady/AP/File
An Amazon.com employee grabs boxes off the conveyor belt at Amazon's Fernley, Nev., warehouse, in this 2008 file photo. Amazon.com went dark for about 15 minutes on Monday, August 19, 2013. The company has not commented on the outage.
  • By Dhanya Skariachan Reuters

| NEW YORK

The Amazon.com outage lasted for about 15 minutes on Monday for many users across the United States and Canada.

It was unclear what triggered the rare disruption of the world's largest online retailer. The company offers Amazon Web Services to ramp up server capacity for customers to prevent outages exactly like this. Amazon.com did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Earlier on Monday, users from New York and Toronto to San Francisco got only error messages when trying to access the popular shopping website. The news came less than a week after the website of the New York Times went down for about two hours.

Amazon has $86 billion in annual gross merchandise volume, including its business through third-party sellers, according to consultants at RetailNet Group. Going by that estimate, Amazon processes some $163,622 in transactions per minute on average, suggesting that the brief outage cost Amazon about $2.5 million.

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