Amazon.com blames hourlong outage on internal glitch, not hacker

By Glen Creno The Arizona Republic Mar. 16, 2000 17:46

Internet retailing giant Amazon.com dropped offline for an hour today, forcing the company to post a "We'll be right back" message where its Web storefront should have been.

Amazon blamed the outage on an internal glitch but wasn't more specific. The company emphasized that it hadn't been hit with another "denial of service" hacker attack like the one that crippled Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay and other big-name Web sites last month.

"We deal with very complex systems here. Unfortunately, from time to time, there will be a hiccup on those systems," Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith said.

Amazon crashed at 2:09 p.m. Pacific time, or 3:09 p.m. Arizona time, today. Visitors to the site were greeted with the "We'll be right back" notice.

"We're sorry, but our store is closed temporarily," it said. "We expect to be back soon."

It also said auction times at the site would be extended.

Amazon said it doesn't keep track of the number of outages it has experienced. Smith said this afternoon that engineers were still working to pinpoint the problem.

"We invest heavily to prevent these inconveniences," said Emily Glassman, another Amazon spokeswoman. "On a rare occasion, they do occur."

http://www.arizonarepublic.com/news/articles/0316AMAZON.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 16, 2000