The Amazon website for United States and Canadian customers went offline for about half an hour last night.

Shoppers were greeted with the message “Oops! We‘re very sorry,” alongside a “500 Service Unavailable Error” report.

It is understood that the tech error cost Amazon $5m based on average sales of $117,882 a minute.

Michael Allen, Director of APM, Compuware, commented: “When you consider the site makes thousands of pounds a second, this outage will clearly have had an impact on Amazon‘s revenues. However, it‘s not just Amazon that will have been affected.

“If you look at the Outage Analyzer service, at least 82 other domains were impacted; although the actual number is likely to be much higher. This is because many other businesses will be connected to the Amazon site utilising things like images or login information.”

The company‘s cloud service, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) rarely goes down, but did experience problems in June and October last year and took out partner sites such as Netflix, Instagram, and Reddit in the process.