Update (3:38 p.m. ET): Amazon is back online after suffering a rare outage for the better part of an hour on Monday afternoon.

Earlier: Amazon.com appears to be suffering from a rare outage — at least for users in the United States.

The e-commerce website has been down for nearly an hour, though international versions of the website continue to function normally. Amazon is reportedly aware of the issue and says it will be back online soon. We've reached out to Amazon for more information and will update this post when we hear back.

Those visiting Amazon.com in the U.S. were greeted with the following message:

The outage appears to have affected other websites as well:

Amazon is down, and US pledges aren't coming through. We're monitoring the situation: http://t.co/tpzylaSXPB — Kickstarter (@kickstarter) August 19, 2013

Image: David McNew/Stringer/Getty Images