Amazon.com should consider providing more details about the outage that affected its Web site Monday for the sake of customer and investor confidence, some industry observers say.

Considering that tens of thousands of people are likely to have experienced various degrees of difficulty with Amazon's Web site Monday, observers say the online retail giant might do well to disclose the cause of the outage and the steps being taken to prevent it from happening again.

Amazon acknowledges the problem and attributes it to having "complicated systems that have problems from time to time," Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said. "That's what we're saying. I don't have any information on what to attribute it to other than that."

Amazon would be well served to be more specific and candid about the snafu, particularly since it happened during the company's busiest sales season, an analyst said. "I hope Amazon doesn't just try to let this blow over and not explain what happened because obviously it happened at a critical time for their business. Consumers and investors really want to know what Amazon is doing to rectify this, so that problems like this one don't happen again," said Patrick Mahoney, consumer technologies and services analyst at The Yankee Group.

Mahoney experienced the outage first hand. He was on a holiday shopping spree at Amazon on Monday and after entering his credit card information and clicking on the checkout button to finish the transaction he was served a page that said something along the lines that Amazon's system was unavailable. He remained in the dark as to whether his order had gone through successfully until Tuesday, when he received the automated e-mail Amazon routinely sends to shoppers to confirm a transaction.

"This outage probably created a lot of consumer confusion," he said. "If you have entered your credit card number and it does appear to have gone through but you can't doublecheck that, then you might go back and do it again, and Amazon could then potentially have issues with double-purchasing and problems like that."

Amazon's site was intermittently inaccessible for about four to five hours during Monday morning Pacific Standard Time, during which about 20% of site visitors weren't able to get into the site on a first try, having to either hit their browser's reload button repeatedly to gain entry or come back later, said Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote Systems, a company that monitors Web site performance.

Under normal circumstances, the Amazon home page takes two to three seconds to download, while during the problematic period Monday that average climbed to about 30 seconds, Patel said. "It was a surprise to see a site as big as Amazon experiencing this type of problem, considering it depends on the online channel for its revenue, and especially at this time of year," Patel said, adding that Keynote hadn't previously detected an outage of this scope at Amazon this year.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.