Amazon’s Abebooks.com is suffering a hardware outage

For most of the weekend Abebooks.com owned by Amazon, has been suffering an outage. No buying or selling has been taking place on the well regarded vintage and quality book marketplace. Early on Saturday they made this announcement.

All our websites & services are currently unavailable due to technical issues. Sorry about this. We’re working on fixing the problem.

— AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) September 2, 2017

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect, and also worrying, is that is that Abebooks confess that customer support and contact systems have also been affected and they are advising users to check out Twitter and Facebook for updates.

Update: Customer Support tools are also affected & they cannot respond to inquiries. Check our Facebook & Twitter feeds for updates.

— AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) September 3, 2017

As at time of publication they confess there is no predictable timescale for a resolution. There is also no obvious explanation for the problems or talk of recompense for sellers. This was the latest comment on Sunday.

We're still trying to fix the technical issues that have been affecting our sites & services. Thank you for your patience!

— AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) September 3, 2017

Abebooks.com has always been a standalone enterprise from Amazon, who have creditably not meddled. But such a technical meltdown at an Amazon property is a little worrying. We’ll see how the the situation pans out and whether they’re up and running again by Monday but, suffice to say, already, this is a big blow to Abebook sellers. If it persists into a third full day, could this also be the end for abebooks.com?

Have you been impacted by this technical problem?