Oct. 25, 2001 -- Internet affiliate marketing exchange LinkShare is publicly blaming Exodus Communications for an outage Wednesday night that knocked out an e-commerce system used by thousands of web sites.
The reported outage comes as Exodus seeks to reassure customers about its future in the wake of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on Sept 27. But in an e-mail this morning, LinkShare told its affiliates the company is considering changing providers.
"We are investigating the situation further with Exodus/GlobalCenter, and will relocate our servers if necessary to ensure that our hosting service provides the performance levels that we expect," LinkShare told its affiliates.
LinkShare manages affiliate marketing programs that allow more than 500 major merchants such as Dell, OfficeMax, J.C. Penney and 1-800-Flowers to sell their products through banner ads and links placed on thousands of participating web sites. Merchants pay commissions to LinkShare affiliate sites for any sales that result from "click-throughs" to the merchants' online stores.
From 8:30 to 10 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, LinkShare's links weren't linking.
"Exodus/GlobalCenter, our hosting facility in New York, went down, resulting in error messages when a user tried to click through on a LinkShare link," the company said. "As soon as we were alerted, we redirected all click-through traffic to our servers in a different facility."
Exodus did not respond to inquiries about LinkShare's comments. Exodus is among the industry's largest data center operators, with 35 facilities in the US and nine more in Europe and Asia.
LinkShare offers clients a host of Web-based tools to create, track, and optimize their thousands of affiliate relationships.