The Web site of Internet retailer Amazon.com was unavailable for two hours on Monday--evidently the result of an application error, according to monitoring firm Keynote Systems.
Keynote said problems with Amazon.com's site began occurring on Aug. 21 at about 11 a.m. Pacific and ended two hours later. The Internet performance monitoring firm said the site was unusable from more than 50 cities worldwide.
While Amazon.com's physical server was online, the application that powers the e-commerce site was not functioning "or had a significant back-end problem," Keynote spokesman Dan Berkowitz wrote in an e-mail. "Keynote considers this to be a fairly significant outage."
Patty Smith, director of corporate communications for Amazon.com, confirmed that the company's site was down on Monday, but would not say how long the outage lasted or what precipitated it.
"As I'm sure you know, the systems that run the Amazon Web site [are] very complex and we do our best to make sure it's operating at peak performance," Smith said. "On those rare occasions when problems occur, we work to get the site back and fully functional as quickly as possible, as we did in this case."
Smith added, "We don't discuss the back-end systems, so I'm not able to tell you how we were able to correct this problem."
Amazon.com, which has historically been tight-lipped about its infrastructure, operates Web servers that run the Linux operating system. The Seattle-based company has used Hewlett-Packard servers since 1999.
According to Bloomberg News, during the Aug. 21 outage, the Amazon.com site had the following message: "We're sorry! 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."
Business Intelligence 
