Amazon's Site Goes Down, Gets Up, Stumbles Again

Computerworld - For unexplained reasons, Amazon.com Inc.'s Web site was inaccessible for about three hours on June 6 and then suffered from performance slowdowns last Monday.

During the initial outage, the online retailer posted a notice on its forum site for sellers saying that the snafu was an "unplanned event." Later, an Amazon spokesman said only that the company's systems are "very complex" and may run into problems "on rare occasions, despite our best efforts."

Then, for a 20-minute period on June 9, only about 30% of would-be visitors managed to get onto the site, according to Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks Web performance.

After the site briefly stabilized, its availability fell off again, with only 68% of shoppers able to access it for a period of 13 minutes, Keynote said.

Amazon again confirmed that there was a problem without disclosing what it was. It said that some customers had reported "intermittent" access problems on Monday and that it was "working to resolve the issues."

Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, speculated that a faulty system configuration may have discombobulated Amazon.com's vast network of servers. "The more complex a system is, the more challenging it is to maintain," he noted.

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