Amazon.com Goes Down in Unlikely Outage, Pops Back Up

, the world's largest online retailer, went down briefly this morning in an unlikely and unexpected outage.

Users who logged on to the site were greeted by one simple message: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." While outages have become an

for

and

various services, this is one of the rare moments when Amazon's retail sales have been halted by an outage. As a corporation, Amazon has experienced numerous problems through its cloud services unit. The company is famous for causing a

that took down

on Christmas Day, angering millions of customers worldwide. During the same period, Amazon's own video service continued to run without a hitch. Today's outage turned out to be so brief that Twitter -- the place where everyone turns to rant about their favorite tech problems -- has been

.