Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Receive the latest technology news and information.
Application/Web Development
Web Site Management
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
Cloud Computing
View all newsletters




Privacy Policy
 

Two-hour outage sidelines Amazon.com

The problem hit the site around noon, Pacific time, on Monday

August 23, 2006 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Online retailer Amazon.com was hit Monday by a "major" two-hour Web site outage, according to Internet performance monitoring vendor Keynote Systems Inc.

The outage, discovered by San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote's Internet performance monitoring systems, occurred Monday between 11:02 a.m. and 12:42 p.m. PDT, said Keynote spokesman Dan Berkowitz.

"Most users around the world attempting to access the Amazon.com Web site would not have been able to access the site" during the outage, Berkowitz said in an e-mail message. "Keynote considers this to be a fairly significant outage."

In an interview today, Berkowitz said Keynote does not know the exact cause of the outage, but he pointed to a back-end system problem as one possibility.

Amazon.com Inc. spokesman Craig Berman said today that he couldn't discuss the cause of the outage because the company doesn't comment on its back-end systems.

"We strive every day to provide the best experience for our customers, and we have a Web site that is very complex," he said. If a problem arises, Amazon works "to get it fully functional as quickly as possible, which is what we did" after Monday's incident, he added.

Berkowitz said the Amazon.com Web site is continuously monitored by his company as part of the Keynote Business 40 Index, which tracks site performance of some of the busiest and largest sites on the Internet.

"It's a big deal because it's one of the major sites on the Internet," Berkowitz said. "They don't have too many outages."

Read more about web site management in Computerworld's Web Site Management Knowledge Center.



Jump to comments

Amazon.com

Additional Resources

EFD vs. HDD - What You Need to Know
WHITE PAPER
Enterprise flash drives provide a new Tier 0 storage layer capable of delivering high I/O performance at a very low latency. Proper use of EFDs in an Oracle environment can deliver increased performance compared to fibre channel drives. Read the recommendations for identification of the best DB components for EFDs.
Gartner Research Report: Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers, 2009
WHITE PAPER
The market for products to improve the delivery of application software over networks remains dynamic and innovative. Vendors focused on solving enterprises' most-pressing application problems have become the top players.
Eight Criteria for Server Load Balancing
WHITE PAPER
Server load balancers are a simple yet highly effective means to scale an application environment while ensuring its availability. Today's solutions should also address application performance and security. Read about the top eight criteria you should consider when choosing a server load balancer and how Citrix NetScaler meets those requirements.

White Papers & Webcasts

The Workday User Experience Video
Watch Workday's Creative Director, Scott Lietzke, discuss the business-centered design philosophy at Workday.

Case Study: Live Nation and Citrix NetScaler
When Live Nation spun off from Clear Channel Communications it urgently needed to consolidate nearly 100 different Web sites.  

Business Process Framework Demo
Learn about Configurable Business Processes and Calculated Fields. Watch Now!

Manager Experience Demo
Go beyond self-service solutions to perform more effectively. Watch Now.


IT Jobs