Craigslist suffers third outage in a week

Craigslist.org, one of the Web's top classified sites, suffered its third outage in the last week on Monday.

An unidentified glitch prevented many visitors to Craigslist from accessing the site for about an hour, Jim Buckmaster, the company's chief executive, said in an e-mail interview. The problem, which began at 11:05 a.m. PDT, is still being investigated by the company, Buckmaster wrote.

Craigslist went down twice last week and the company's technicians suspect all three outages are related, Buckmaster said.

"(The outage is) highly unusual for us," Buckmaster said in his e-mail. "Our total downtime (planned and unplanned) is generally less than five hours per year, and we've had years without so much as a single hour of downtime."

Craigslist operates in about 190 cities across the U.S. and abroad. Each month the site generates 3 billion page views from about 10 million unique users, making it the seventh most popular site on the Internet in terms of page views.

Founded by Craig Newmark in 1995, Craigslist operates with a staff of less than 20 but has increasingly become the destination for people interested in posting help-wanted, automobile and real estate advertisements.

These classified categories once generated millions for newspapers.