Amazon Unreachable? Store & webservices.amazon.com

Anyone else having a hard time reaching the retail front end or webservices.amazon.com api backend?

Even on the front end I'm getting this:

That's what the home page is showing and displaying after clicking the continue shopping button. The url seems to reveal a server 500 error:

Even the big boys get the Server 500 Blues...

 

I'm also getting this... arf.

 

Same here too... over and hour now!

We're sorry!
An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we're already working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly.
If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

 

Unless they got attacked it is very hard to understand how they could have such a complete system failure for this period of time without sufficient back-up to allow at least basic (no frills) operation.

Even if they got attacked they should have defenses in place - they are mighty Amazon.com after all and it is 2006, not 1996.

They induce us to become affiliates and we invest time and money to jointly earn cash by driving them sales… only to see a total shut down like this. I know there are no hard guarantees of system availability, but there are reasonable expectations. I just expect Amazon to have better redundancy and reliability with all their cash and human resources. (sigh)

*** The retail side seems to be working again @ 12:47 local time.

 

I never really tried shopping on Amazon.com .. What are your impressions ?