If your ISP is BT then you may be having problems accessing Amazon. The Amazon AWS Health Dashboard says “DNS problems for end users on British Telecom ISP in the UK”.
As well as accessing the Amazon site you may also have issues with other websites hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services), or with certain tools which are hosted on AWS.
Tamebay reader Andy tells us that he can see Amazon, but the CSS is missing so it’s not displaying properly.
Amazon are aware of the issues and are working on them
Amazon have posted the following updates
5:33 AM PDT We are investigating connectivity problems between CloudFront and end users on certain ISPs in the UK.
6:17 AM PDT We can confirm that end users using a single ISP in the UK are experiencing connectivity problems when trying to reach CloudFront. We are working to resolve this issue.
7:04 AM PDT End users using a single ISP, British Telecom, in the UK are experiencing failures when resolving cloudfront.net domain names. We are working with the ISP to resolve this issue. As a workaround, end users can change their resolvers to use a public DNS resolver and successfully resolve cloudfront.net names.
Issue resolved
Amazon have updated their messages to say that the issue should be resolved:
10:10 AM PDT Between 3:07 AM and 9:41 AM PDT, end users using a single ISP, British Telecom, in the UK experienced failures when resolving cloudfront.net domain names. The issue has now been resolved and the service is operating normally.
3 Responses
I noticed this yesterday as our business broadband is BT. I thought I was going mad, how could Amazon itself have no photos or logos i thought. Then I tried our own website that heavily uses the Cloudfront servers and the same.
I refreshed browsers, cleared cache etc. Then I finally found out why in the status page in the AWS system. Even that was rather difficult to get to without any images or css to find my way.
Glad it’s back now though. Does make me think that i need a backup plan for our websites content. More like a fail safe dns. Amazon Cloudfront is very very good normally though.
It’s really clear from this post that Amazon are on the pulse when it comes to dealing with technical issues with their systems compared to a certain other sales channel. Even though it looks like the problem was with BT, Amazon keeps its users (sellers) in the loop with frequent updates.
There are issues with ebay that haven’t been admitted or dealt with for five months, yet alone five hours. Hell, I can think of a couple clocking upto five years!