SEATTLE, Washington - Widespread outages on the popular online shopping site Amazon.com have been traced to an employee's spilled Sierra Mist, admitted Amazon spokesman Berm Craigan. "Contrary to company policy explicitly forbidding such activity," said Craigan, "The unnamed employee had a 20-oz. bottle of Sierra Mist, unopened, near his workstation." Apparently an altercation erupted between rival cliques of customer service representatives, resulting in the destruction of a copier, a networked printer, and the spilling of the soda. "Unfortunately, this was the server that coordinated the activity of the entire neural-linked server farm. In retrospect," he added, "It probably shouldn't have been placed there to begin with."

The problems were first detected Monday morning at approximately 10 a.m. EST. "Those be-nice-to-the-customers jerks are always hitting the sodas by 9," said one anonymous support representative, of the 'customers-are-the-Devil' clan, "If they'd just drink coffee and smoke like the rest of us, we could all get along fine. Yeah, this was coming. It was coming."

Experts point out this isn't the first major outage traced to spilled beverages. "While commonly attributed to the O'Leary cow, the Chicago fire in fact resulted from a snifter of brandy, abandoned for the night, and accidentally brushed into a smoldering ashtray in the home of E. Perkins, at 135 De Koven Street," explained arson forensic expert Clover Lumbard, "And it is now accepted that the 2003 blackout in the northeastern United States resulted from a First Energy line worker carelessly leaving a half-full aluminum can of RC Cola in the bowels of a substation transformer matrix."

Amazon has already taken steps to unite its work force and reposition equipment to prevent such outages in the future. "No one feels this sort of thing more keenly than we do," said Craigan, "We'll do whatever it takes to prevent it from happening again."
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