Further Disruptions on Amazon.com
Leading online retailer Amazon.com suffered sporadic outages to its Web site on Monday, following various unspecified issues that had knocked the site offline for more than two hours days earlier.
The latest disruptions began shortly after 1 p.m. EDT Monday, and lasted at least an hour, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a Web site performance monitoring firm. Keynote’s automated probes were able to access the main Amazon.com site as little as 30 percent of the time.
Shawn White, Keynote’s director of external operations, told the Associated Press that even when the probes were successful in reaching the site, they experienced delays. White said the monitors also found problems with Amazon’s U.K. site, Amazon.co.uk, although other country-specific sites appeared to be functioning.
Patty Smith, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said the problems were intermittent and did not affect the company’s Web Services, a separate service that offers pay-as-you-go data storage to companies.
Amazon’s Web site was shut down for more than two hours during the business day last Friday, displaying an error code to anyone visiting the site.
"Amazon’s systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems," an Amazon statement said, explaining Friday’s outage.
On Monday, Smith said the company has not ruled out any specific cause of the outages, including an external, denial-of-service attack. Various blogs had speculated that such an attack may have occurred, with the intent of overwhelming Amazon’s servers.
But according to White, the "service unavailable" error message, along with the speed with which the site shut down, suggested an internal systems problem rather than a nefarious outside attack. On Monday, visitors saw a similar "service unavailable" message, at times replaced by an apology and promise to rapidly restore services.
Although very rare, outages at Amazon.com have occurred in the past. In 2006 the site experienced short disruptions due to a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft Corp.’s popular Xbox 360 video game machines. And earlier this year, the company’s Web Services experienced issues resulting a system shut down that caused several companies to temporarily lose access to their own data.
Smith didn’t speculate on the sales impact of the latest disruptions. ComScore Inc. reported that Amazon had more than 58 million U.S. visitors in April, and reached $2.13 billion in sales in North America.
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