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Amazon's site is temporarily closed

Parts of the Net retailers' Web site are shut down temporarily, two weeks after the company suffered a similar outage.

Jan. 2, 2002 4:43 p.m. PT

Parts of Amazon.com's Web site were shut down temporarily today, two weeks after the company suffered a similar outage.

The outage, which apparently lasted at least 20 minutes, affected the company's books, music, video, toys, and electronics stores. Customers could still access Amazon's auctions and e-cards areas.

Company representatives said that a scheduled software load caused the outage; they did not say exactly how long the site was down.

On July 15, two days after launching its new toys and electronics stores, Amazon's Web site went down for 36 minutes. In September 1998, Amazon's site went down for nine hours. This followed a 12-hour outage in January 1998.