Keynote Systems Inc., a California-based company that monitors Web site performance, said the latest troubles started shortly after 1 p.m. EDT and lasted at least an hour.
Keynote's automated probes were able to reach the main Amazon.com site as little as 30% of the time. Even when the monitors did reach the site, they faced delays, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations.
The probes also found problems with the British Amazon.co.uk site, but other country-specific sites appeared to be functioning, White said.
Amazon officials did not return phone calls Monday.
On Friday, Amazon's site shut down for more than two hours during the business day, giving an error code to anyone visiting it.
"Amazon's systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems," the company said in a statement explaining Friday's outage.
A similar "service unavailable" message greeted some visitors Monday, though at times the generic message was replaced by an apology and a promise to restore service quickly.
Outages at Amazon are rare, though the retailer had brief disruptions in 2006 because of a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 video game machines.
Earlier this year, Amazon had trouble with a separate service, Amazon Web Services, which offers other companies pay-as-you-go data storage. Several companies temporarily lost access to their own files when that system went down.
How the latest outages will affect sales was not immediately known. Some customers might return to shop later; others may visit a competing site or buy offline instead.
In April, Amazon had more than 58 million U.S. visitors, according to comScore Inc. Last quarter, the company recorded $2.13 billion in sales in North America.
Shares of Amazon lost $1.20 or 1.5% to close Monday at $79.43.
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