It's not very often that a very large, commercial website like Amazon.com is hit with a major outage. Of course, the site has buckled under overwhelming traffic in the past due to special promotions, but very rarely has the entire site gone offline.

This, however, appears to be the case today, and Amazon.com has been offline for the past three hours. Visitors to the site are greeted with a blank white page with the text "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."

The outage is not only affecting the online retail giant, but also third-party retailers that sell through Amazon's marketplace and everyday sellers who use Amazon to peddle goods.

Amazon's Warehouse Deals sister site, however, is still operational.

Interestingly enough, PS3 Fanboy is claiming that rabid PS3/Metal Gear Solid fans crashed Amazon once the Metal Gear Solid 4 PS3 bundle was made available on the site. It seems highly unlikely that such a release would be enough to sideline Amazon, but we'll just have to wait until the company makes an official statement.

Representatives for Amazon.com were not immediately available for comment on the site outage.