Visitors to Amazon.com experienced unexpected delays Monday morning and at times couldn't access the site at all.
Throughout the morning Pacific Time, visitors to Amazon's site were sometimes greeted with a "Service Unavailable" message, and sometimes a "We're sorry!" note. While an Amazon representative said the issues had been resolved by afternoon, as of 1400 PST, attempts to access Amazon were met with an unavailability message. The site appeared live again at 1430, however.
Keynote Systems, which tracks Internet traffic and performance, said Amazon's problems started at 0800 PST, when outages struck 20 percent of people tapping the site, with the remaining 80 percent experiencing slowdowns of up to a minute. Amazon was back up and running by 0945, but problems surfaced again at 1045, according to Keynote.
While the problems largely stopped by 1440, Keynote reported sporadic outages affecting a small population of users. Keynote could not determine whether an Internet attack caused the outage, but said the problems only affected Amazon.
"The measurement numbers coming back to norms," said Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote. "The situation hasn't cleared itself completely."
For Amazon, the timing of the slowdown couldn't be worse. With the holiday season in full bloom, the retailer is in the midst of its busiest sales period, and it has promised Wall Street significant financial growth this quarter. Amazon expects sales to jump by at least 31 percent this quarter to between $2.29bn and $2.54bn, and full-year sales to increase 31 percent to between $6.67bn and $6.9bn.
In the cutthroat retail industry, any holiday hiccough could mean big trouble. Just ask the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart. Its stock took a brief nosedive after the company reported lower-than-expected sales during the Thanksgiving weekend, which is considered the busiest shopping time of the year.
Meanwhile, Amazon's brick-and-mortar competitors in the US, including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target and Home Depot, are trying to complement their in-store sales with online offerings.
Nevertheless, as retailers push sales through their Web sites, it's no wonder online shopping continues to boom. Online spending on the day after Thanksgiving (or Black Friday, a reference to the volume of sales that pushes many retailers into profits), reached $250 million, up 41 percent from $178m in 2003, according to Web statistician ComScore Networks.
On Thanksgiving day, typically a slow shopping day, online sales totaled $133m, doubling last year's $67m, ComScore said. Online shopping visitors accounted for 11.39 percent of all Web visits that day, up from 8.96 percent in 2003, according to online-retail tracker Hitwise.
CNET News.com's Matt Hines contributed to this report.
