Outage hits New York Times

The outage infection seems to be going viral with Amazon becoming the latest victim, after The New York Times, Google and Outlook.

The BBC said the online retailer's UK site was not affected by the 30-minute issue but its Canadian home page carried an error message.

The support section of Intel's web site also went down for some time yesterday, which the company attributed to an internal issue. The company added it was only a coincidence that it happened after the Amazon went down.

Google experienced a flash two-minute downtime on Friday that affected the firm's main search page as also its Gmail email service, YouTube video site and Drive storage product while the disruption at Microsoft's Outlook.com extended over three days.

The New York Times attributed the interruption to an 'internal issue' with its servers, which made the newspaper unavailable for two hours on Wednesday.

According to principal technology analyst at the Davies Murphy Group consultancy, Chris Green, it was very unusual to see such a number of high-profile websites go down over the course of a few days of each other. Since the outages had not yet been explained the implications were huge, he added.

Commentators said it was not clear what triggered the rare 15-minute disruption.

Yesterday, users in New York and Toronto to San Francisco reported they only saw error messages when trying to access the popular shopping website.

Consultants at RetailNet Group said Amazon had $86 billion in annual gross merchandise volume, including its business through third-party sellers. On the basis of that estimate, Amazon processes transaction valued at around $163,622 per minute on average.