The Amazon.com website was inaccessible for about two hours on Friday, though other international sites remained working, including Amazon Canada (http://www.amazon.ca/). Amazon posted an announcement on its seller board at 10:37 AM Pacific announcing that the company was "investigating an issue that has impacted the availability of the Amazon.com website. Engineers are actively engaged in resolving this issue and we will provide an update once the issue is resolved."

The site was up about two hours later. Amazon did not update the announcement over the weekend, but emailed media outlets an announcement stating that "Amazon's systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems."

Meanwhile, eBay experienced a glitch on Friday that prevented some users from logging in to the site. Affected members saw the error "Your user ID or password is incorrect" when they entered the correct log-in information. According to an announcement on the Systems Announcement Board, the problem was resolved, but eBay told users if they still experienced problems, they should use the "I forgot my user ID" or "I forgot my password link" on the sign in page.

Note that eBay has rescheduled its maintenance down time for its PayPal website for June 10, 2008, from 11:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. PT. The PayPal site and a majority of PayPal features will be unavailable during that time.

http://www.amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=154665

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200806060341481.html

To comment or for an update on Amazon's outage, see the AuctionBytes Blog:
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/6/1212779049.html