When Amazon.com's website went down on Friday, there were reports about the potential millions the online retailer lost as a result. While not happy over being closed for business, Amazon's response to the Friday outage - that "on rare occasions" even it "may experience problems" - was intended to assure consumers that they could expect a quick return to the dependable performance they've come to expect from the site.
But what are consumers to think now that Amazon experienced outages on its site once again? Keynote Systems, a company that monitors websites, reported that Amazon began experiencing trouble about one o'clock eastern time yesterday and that consumers were unable to get on the site for an hour or more. Keynote's probes found similar problems with Amazon's U.K. site but others around the globe appeared unaffected.
Amazon had no comment on its latest troubles at the time of this report. The company had more than 58 million visitors to its U.S. website in April, according to comScore.
Discussion Questions: Do you think Amazon lost a large number of purchases with its recent outages or have consumers by-and-large waited for it to come back online to buy whatever they were looking for? Now that it has experience outages for a second time, do you think consumers will begin to question Amazon's reliability?