It’s 21:40 UK time and Amazon.co.uk appears to be down.

Here’s a clipping from the status report.

At this stage it’s impossible to know what’s going on. Amazon.com is working normally. It could be a sysadmin error, I suppose. But if it’s the product of an attack, then we’re into uncharted waters. Everyone I know had assumed that Amazon had enough resource to cope with anything anyone could throw at them.

For now, I’m assuming cock-up rather than conspiracy. It’s always been the best null hypothesis in the past.

Update (21:47): Amazon.co.uk back. Dashboard still reporting problems. Curiouser and curiouser.

STILL LATER: Amazon says the outage was caused by a “hardware failure”. In itself, that’s interesting; after all, one of the USPs of cloud computing is its allegedly astonishing resilience to hardware failure.