Amazon's US homepage taken offline in unexplained outage

Amazon's US website's homepage was unavailable for almost an hour today, after unexplained issues with its service.

The US site for Amazon's e-commerce business experienced sporadic outages for 49 minutes, the company has confirmed, but it has yet to offer an explanation as to what caused the outage.

"The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes," an Amazon representative said in a statement sent into V3.

"Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted."

The outage was only reported to affect the US sites gateway page. Users attempting to reach the Amazon.com homepage were presented with a "services not responding" error.

Amazon's UK domain was unaffected by the outage. The company's cloud and storage solutions also appeared to be working.

The outage looked to have an affect on Amazon stocks. Shares in the company dropped over two percent the day the outage occurred.

It is rare for Amazon's consumer shopping website to go offline. However, the companies cloud storage department has been know to suffer the occasional hiccup.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage last December. The downtime caused Amazon to apologise for the mistake.

Last October, AWS also went offline. The outage saw websites like Reddit and Instagram briefly lose service.

Amazon's outage comes on the same day as a similar outage from social networking site Twitter. The site was down for three hours before eventually being re-established.