The home page of Seattle-based bigwig online retailer Amazon witnessed an outage for nearly 50 minutes on Thursday, with the result that customers had difficulties in connecting to the retailer's main Web address, www. amazon. com.

According to reports, the most recent Amazon downtime apparently affected almost all the US users who failed in their attempts to access the website from their computers and mobile handsets. Users in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago reported that their efforts to access the website resulted in a page which merely read "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."

The outage - which apparently began at around 2:44 p. m. in New York - chiefly made the Amazon. com home page unreachable by the users, though the other parts of the website continued to function properly, including links to particular pages within the store and the cloud-computing services.

Without elaborating on the reason behind the latest Amazon disruption, the online retailer's spokesman Ty Rogers said in an e-mailed statement that it the landing page of the company remained available to some customers.

In an email to Computerworld, Rogers said: "The gateway page of Amazon. com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes. Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted."