Amazon Back Up After 30-Minute Outage (AMZN)

After roughly 30 to 40 minutes of inactivity, Amazon.com AMZN went back online. It was a troublesome moment for consumers who were looking to save big on books, DVDs and a multitude of electronics. But instead of rushing to the nearest Barnes & Noble BKS or the closest Best Buy BBY, shoppers seemed content to wait things out. Fast Company compiled some of the most amusing responses on Twitter, including Time homepage editor Alex Fitzpatrick who (after learning that the outage had ended) quipped, "Phew. I almost walked into a bookstore." Related: Amazon.com Goes Down, Leaving Millions Forced To Work Comedian Jenna Kim Jones also weighed in on the problems Amazon has experienced.

Amazon was down for 30 minutes today. Google was down for 5 minutes on Friday. The NSA is like "Hey I'm working here!"

— JKJ (@jennakimjones) August 19, 2013

Jokes aside, most people merely turned to Twitter to reiterate the fact that Amazon had gone down. It was not a life-changing event but it was one that got the attention of several individuals. Depending on how many people tried to visit Amazon.com during the outage, hundreds of thousands of sales may have been lost (or at the very least delayed) in the process. Amazon has not yet provided an explanation for the outage, but the company is no stranger to technical issues. The dot-com giant issued a lengthy statement to apologize after its AWS (Amazon Web Services) division took out Netflix NFLX on Christmas. "Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize," Amazon wrote in its statement. "We know how critical our services are to our customers' businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement in the ELB service." It seems that the company may have to issue another, similar statement very soon. Amazon is not the only suffering outages, however. As noted by Jenna Kim Jones, Google GOOG also suffered a brief outage last week. According to CNET, Google's problems caused a "big drop" in global traffic. Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report. Louis Bedigian is the Senior Tech Analyst and Features Writer of Benzinga. You can reach him at 248-636-1322 or louis(at)benzingapro(dot)com. Follow him @LouisBedigianBZ