Amazon Back To Normal Following Site TroublesAmazon Back To Normal Following Site Troubles

Online-retail giant Amazon.com Inc. was back to normal Tuesday after shoppers suffered a half-day of intermittent problems on the site.

The retailer's site was intermittently inaccessible Monday morning Pacific time, Craig Berman, a spokesman for the Seattle-based company, said. He declined to give any specifics as to what caused the problem.

"We've got some really complicated systems, and from time to time they have problems," Berman said.

Web-performance tracker Keynote Systems Inc., which monitors Amazon and nine other of the largest Internet retailers, including Best Buy, Costco, Eddie Bauer, JCPenney, Office Depot, Office Max, Sears, Target and Walmart, said shoppers experienced problems accessing the Amazon site between 7 a.m. PST to noon PST.

"Some people got through and others couldn't," Keynote analyst Roopak Patel said. "It was very atypical for Amazon."

Of the largest retailers, Amazon was the first to experience a problem during this year's holiday shopping season with a "significant impact" on performance, Patel said. The season runs from the Friday after Thanksgiving to Christmas.

Online retailers, in general, saw some decrease in performance on the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving, two of the biggest shopping days on the web, Keynote said. Nevertheless, retailers overall performed a little better than last year.