Amazon.com Down and Out

by Frank Jovine on 06/06/2008 in Business, eCommerce

Amazon.com’s Web site was down in North America for about two hours in the middle of the day Friday because of system problems, the online retailer said.

A little after 10 a.m. PDT, the company’s retail Web site shut down, giving an error code to anyone visiting it, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a California-based company that measures Web site performance.

I find it amazing that a site such as this retail giant could even go off the air. Amazon is a cash cow, and that would make me think that its infrastructure has more redundancy than rice in China. How can such a popular site go off the air for such a long time (2 hours)?

Amazon.com Inc. spokesman Craig Berman said in a brief e-mail statement. “We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible.”

Well, two hours is not minimizing disruption or bring the site back online quickly! Mr. Berman your a business that’s well known, and your customers expect availability 100% of the time. Stop with the “we work to minimize any disruption”. What you should say is that “we guarantee 100% uptime”.

I wonder how many sales were lost during this two hour outage?