Amazon DISAPPEARS from internet

I find it curious the two largest companies on the Internet had outages very near each other. Also curious that L3 (Level 3) is involved with the Amazon one as its a huge government telecom contractor, is someone testing how hard it would be to bring down the Internet for a period of time? Just sayin'....  -Bill / AK

Amazon DISAPPEARS from internet
Last week Google, this week Amazon, next week El Reg?
By Jack Clark, 19th August 2013
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/19/amazon_outage/

Updated Amazon.com has dropped offline*, amid widespread reports of trouble in the underlying Amazon Web Services infrastructure cloud.

The problems began at about 11.50am Pacific Time on Monday in California, and Twitter quickly flooded with reports of people having trouble accessing both Amazon.com and the Amazon Web Services cloud, as well.

At the time of writing, the Amazon Web Services status page displayed no information about the error, and Amazon.com was unreachable.

A quick poll of Twitter saw multiple AWS developers reporting problems ranging from having trouble accessing the sign-in console, to problems getting onto the control panel. Developers did say that existing EC2 server resources continued to run, however.

A traceroute run by The Register saw us being taken around Amazon's US data center locations via known-Amazon transit provider L3, with requests timing out after the 17th hop routed us into Washington.

This outage follows a worldwide Google-fail last week that saw the Chocolate Factory temporarily disappear from the internet, dropping worldwide net traffic by as much as 40 per cent, according to some analyses. ®

* Update
12:44pm Pacific Time: it's baaack...