More site trouble for Amazon.com?

So says this Buzzblog reader. ... I was able to reach the site just now. On Friday, if you recall, Amazon had major problems for several hours over the course of the afternoon. Web monitoring company Pingdom has them being down for seven minutes so far today, which may not seem like much but is about half of what the site has made its users endure during a typical bad month over the past two years.

(Update: This blogger says he had that Friday-like difficulty again today, too.)

(Update 2: Now Associated Press is reporting today's round of trouble: "The extent of the problem isn't yet known but some attempts to reach the e-commerce site Monday have resulted in 'service unavailable' errors.")

(Update 3: Just placed a request for comment to Amazon's PR department. They were quite good on Friday in terms of getting back to me promptly, which cannot be said for some companies -- hello, RIM -- under similar circumstances.)

(Update 4: Blogger Brian Bond writes of the real victims here: "The most chilling impact, though, is how much forward momentum was just wiped out for the company and the marketing team responsible for reaching their targets. How many of the hard-fought growth numbers for the period are just negated by technology failure." … Bet you had forgotten about the marketers.)

(Update 5: Another blogger who couldn't get on today writes: "You would think that a company of their size wouldn’t have problems with downtime." … They almost never do, which is what makes this recent spate so newsworthy.)

(Update 6: More Amazon ups and downs and ups and down reported by participants in the Blu-ray.com Forum. ... And, on a completely unrelated note, I couldn't help but notice the guy there who uses an old Pat Patriot logo for his forum icon; way cool.)

(Update 7: More details here from Associated Press: "Keynote Systems Inc., a California-based company that monitors Web site performance, said the latest troubles started shortly after 1 p.m. EDT and lasted at least an hour. Keynote's automated probes were able to reach the main Amazon.com site as little as 30 percent of the time. Even when the monitors did reach the site, they faced delays, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations.")

(Update 8, 5:50 ET: AP now has this from the company: "Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith described Monday's troubles as 'intermittent' and said they did not affect Amazon Web Services, a separate offering that provides pay-as-you-go data storage to other companies such as the photo-sharing service SmugMug Inc. and Web e-mail provider Mailtrust.") 

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