An unidentified Amazon worker explained how the rankings system broke down on the website last weekend, explaining that a worker in France “had filled out a field incorrectly” which caused 57,310 titles to be de-ranked on Amazon.
The Seattle PI landed the interview with an Amazon coder who explained the varying degrees of emergency within the company: “Sev-3” is the internal code for a problem that affects one Amazon users, and Sev-1 is the code for “the most critical operational issues.” According to the worker, the situation was upgraded to “Sev-1” on Sunday afternoon.
Here’s more from the post: “‘Most everyone at one point who works with catalog systems has broken some piece of the catalog,’ the source said. In fact, employees sometimes tell war stories over lunch where the conversation can go something like this: ‘Oh yeah, I remember when I broke a portion of France and all this stuff happened.'” (Via Publishers Weekly)
