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Amazon’s Site Outage Raises Scale Questions

Written by Evan Schuman
August 23rd, 2006

When Amazon.com crashed for almost two hours on Monday, it might have meant little were it not for the fact that a major industry report had foreshadowed it just three days earlier. Do related problems with Wal-Mart and Google show a trend? Late last week, Internet traffic monitoring firm Keynote Systems issued a report that said many of the largest E-Commerce players will face major load-handling challenges for the holidays if they don't make major changes quickly.

To help out, Amazon generously knocked out its own servers for almost two hours on Monday. OK, OK. Amazon probably didn't crash just to help Keynote make a point. But it's timing was impeccable nonetheless.

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Posted in E-Commerce, IT Strategy/Industry, Premium Content, Software
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