Amazon.com Suffers More Outages

Amazon.com's home page went down again Monday, just three days after the company suffered outages and performance problems.

Just three of every 10 visitors were able to access the Amazon Web site for 20 minutes, and the problems recurred twice more on Monday, according to Keynote Systems, which tests and measures Internet service with more than 3,000 servers in more than 200 locations. The servers are located in 50 cities throughout the world, and they connect to major ISPs in each market and region.

Keynote reported that Amazon suffered interruptions Monday from 11:03 a.m. to 11:23 a.m. (PDT), then again from 10:56 a.m. until 11:09 a.m., and finally from 12:43 p.m. through 1:01 p.m. The first and second outages blocked seven out of 10 users from accessing Amazon's home page, Keynote said. The third incident blocked 32% of visitors from accessing the site, according to Keynote's analysis.

On Friday, Amazon suffered similar problems from 10:16 a.m. until 12:58 p.m. Shoppers who tried to access the home page during that time saw a blank white page with the following message: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." According to Keynote, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, and other foreign Web properties worked properly during that time.

However, Monday's outages did hit Amazon's U.K. site at 10:06 a.m. (PDT), initially reducing visitor access to 30%. U.K. access returned to normal in just under two hours.

Amazon media representatives did not immediately return calls for comment.

During each incident, visitors who did access the home page encountered slower access and download speeds, Keynote reported. Amazon users normally download in less than seven seconds and sometimes in less than four seconds, but during the outages download speeds were substantially reduced, causing some Web browsers to time out, Keynote said.

The difficulties came as Amazon tries to convince other organizations and IT managers to use cloud computing so companies like Amazon can manage their IT infrastructure and data via the Internet.

Keynote collects more than 160 million mobile and Internet performance measurements daily.