Amazon Stumbles Again

By Greg McNevin

June 11, 2008: Following on from its website woes last Friday, Amazon is again having a rash of 'service unavailable' errors, with the retailer disappearing off the net and slowly reappearing in both the US and the UK.

On Monday the site dropped to 30 percent availability for over 20 minutes, however, unlike Friday’s two-hour plus outage, this time the UK site experienced problems too. Even when it came back online availability was unsteady for a good hour.

Amazon has admitted that some of its users were experiencing intermittent problems, but it said that problems were limited to its retailing business and its web services were not affected. Beyond this, the company did not shed any light on why the outage occurred.

This has lead to speculation that the firm has been attacked by a bot network, particularly in the wake of reports that the internet movie database, which is owned and run by Amazon, had been taken down in a sustained attack consisting of a flood of image requests.

On Friday Amazon issued a statement asserting that its hosting services are very complex and do experience problems on rare occasions.

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