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Amazon’s Site Crashes For 90 Minutes Monday

Written by Evan Schuman
August 21st, 2006

As if to stress the fragility of large E-Commerce in handling large loads with the upcoming holiday season, Amazon.com “experienced an outage of its main U.S. Web site for at least an hour and a half” on Monday, according to the Bloomberg News Service.

“We’re sorry!” the Amazon.com home page said Monday from at least 2:08 p.m. until 3:45 p.m, according to Bloomberg. “An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re already working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly.” Amazon.com spokeswoman Patty Smith declined to say how long the service was down except to say it was for “a short period.”

Keynote Systems confirmed the Amazon outage, although it clocked it at closer to two hours. “The outage was detected in more 50 cities worldwide. The problem seemed to be a Web server/application issue,” said Keynote spokesman Dan Berkowitz. “The physical server was on online, but the application was not or had a significant backend problem. Keynote considers this to be a fairly significant outage.”

Posted in E-Commerce, IT Strategy/Industry, Software
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