Amazon website knocked offline briefly

Amazon.com stumbled for a short time on Thursday with aspiring visitors tripped in their efforts to reach the online retail titan's main shopping website.

"The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes," a spokesman for the Seattle, Washington-based company said in response to an AFP inquiry.

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

Amazon Web Services rents out datacenter power "in the cloud" to Internet companies including Internet film and television service provider Netflix.

Hackers claimed responsibility on Twitter for the brief outage, but someone with knowledge of the situation told AFP that it was not related to any outside group.

"Oh, there, Amazon's back now," Twitter user Eric Meyer said in a tweet fired off at the one-to-many messaging service. "Whew! We can resume our mindless consumerism with clear eyes, full hearts."