Amazon: Third crash in two weeks

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Amazon: Third crash in two weeks By Reuters

December 5, 2000 5:56 PM PT URL: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2661697,00.html SEATTLE -- For the third time in less than two weeks, Amazon.com Inc. crashed on Tuesday due to what the online bookseller said was an internal software mix-up.

"We ran two programs at the same time that will not run together. The combination of the two brought the site down, and we identified the problem and analyzed it," Amazon.com spokeswoman Kristin Schaefer said.

The site was back online shortly after 4:00 p.m. PST after an outage that lasted about 40 minutes.

A message displayed at http://www.amazon.com shortly before 4:00 p.m. PST said the store was temporarily closed. A moment later, the message was replaced with another saying, "System Error. We're sorry. We have encountered a technical problem, which we will investigate."

The problems come during the busy holiday shopping season, a time analysts say is crucial for the Seattle-based company as it strives to prove its Internet retailing model can start making money.

Last Thursday, the site crashed for about 15 minutes, following a closure the previous week that lasted for about 30 minutes. Amazon attributed both those closures to internal glitches.

Schaefer said it was a coincidence that the difficulties had hit within such a short time frame.

"Certainly we never want something like this to happen, but unfortunately it does. The systems are up 365 days a year, 24 hours a day so unfortunately it's going to happen sometimes," Shaefer said.

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 04, 2001


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