It’s not just you, Amazon search is down *Update: it’s back up

If you’ve been trying to search for something on Amazon .com for the past few hours, you’ve been receiving a “service unavailable” Error 500. That’s because Amazon is suffering an outage.

While the homepage and the product pages are still working, you also get an error if you try to open a category. Clicking on “Books” for example gives you an error. The issue also affects the Amazon mobile apps.

Today’s downtime seems to be affecting Amazon.com only as search is working just fine on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, etc. Similarly, there isn’t any outage on Amazon Web Services’ status page. AWS customers don’t seem to be affected.

Still, think about how much money Amazon is losing right now. Amazon processes so many orders per minute that even a few minutes of downtime is a big deal.

Given that reports of Amazon being down started more than three hours ago, this is more serious than a brief outage.

Update: As of 10 am EDT, search functionality seems to have been restored. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment or details on the outage and will update accordingly.