Organic Marketing - SEM » Amazon.com Still Down

This morning a message from Twitter came through my FriendsFeed and I read, “Amazon.com Is DOWN”. I didn’t give it a second thought because systems go down and come back up within seconds. Well, I’m still reading about Amazon being down and at 2:41PM Central. So I visited Amazon and yes it’s still down.

When I worked at Kintera (recently purchased by Blackbaud) and the system would go down accidentally the business side of the house would joke about going home; “Sphere’s down”, “someone unplugged the internet”. But then there were times when internal teams were alerted of a scheduled maintenance and it was routine not to notify the customer. While most of the times the clients wouldn’t even notice, when they did project managers would back peddle and make up excuse after excuse. So, with Amazon being down it’s hard to say what’s really happening; accident or scheduled maintenance. When Sphere would die and all our clients became unable to access the back-end - the Error Page was always the last thing to edit or fix. One time there was a typo. Typos and misspellings are always a good way to showcase the brains behind a system when the sites go down. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not much of a speller, but I’m not a software company either….

Update: I just published this post and refreshed my Amazon.com browser and poof it’s back 2:56PM Central.