Amazon owned Abebooks experienced a complete and utter outage on Thursday. They reported the problem on their homepage but it seems that during the outage (which may have lasted something like 2 hours, unconfirmed) no shoppers could make a purchase on the site. They were also keen and quick to annouce that personal data had not been compromised and they would be explaining more too soon.
Once again, surprisingly, the outage meant that their customer support services were also unable to communicate with buyers and sellers during the outage.
We are currently experiencing a problem, and our sites and services are unavailable. We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Sorry about this and we appreciate your patience.
— AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) March 1, 2018
Our sites are back up. Thanks for your patience. We are still working to restore several remaining services. Our Customer Service team is operational again.
— AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) March 1, 2018
It remains a surprise that the Amazon owned second hand books marketplace has experienced any difficulties at all especially when a similar problem was reported in September 2017. Then, as now, the cause of the problem was said to be a hardware fault.
The service update from Abebooks, on the website said:
We are currently experiencing a hardware issue which is causing all AbeBooks sites and services to be unavailable. Buyer and seller information remains secure and is not at risk.
We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We do not yet have an estimated time when this is going to be resolved.
Customer Support tools are also affected and they are unable to respond to inquiries at this time so please check our Facebook and Twitter accounts for updates.
Tweets by AbeBooks
https://www.facebook.com/abebooks/Customer Support will resume responding to all inquiries as soon as they are able. We apologize for the inconvenience and interruption of services.
-Abebooks.com
