It started on April Fools Day. Amazon’s website traffic ranking service, Alexa, failed to update its rankings.

Traders at Alexadex, the fantasy stock market for Alexa traffic rankings, were inconvenienced but hardly shocked. As experienced Alexa monitors, they’re accustomed to sporadic updating.

By Sunday, however, some Alexadex players became desperate, like Efecan, “I want updatessssss!!! :( (((( AAAaaaAAAaaaAAa :’(”

…while others tried aggression. SJinNJ spoke for many: “I demand updates NOW!”

…and comrades like midleo sat expectantly, “i hate waiting.”

Nonsensical Output From Alexa[Alexa Gone Wild!]

Monday brought strange tidings: Alexa’s updating was still silent. And its webpage had lost its mind. For example, Google, a site that is reliably ranked as the second most visited place on the web, was ranked 3 for the day, 2 for its 3 month average, 1,195,258 for its one week average, and… get this… a 3 month traffic change of over 5.7 million!

At first we thought, “Gee. You gotta admire Google’s genius. It’s really tough to have 5.7 million sites that attract more traffic than you, and still be number 3 in the rankings.”

Then we checked out Microsoft, Oracle, and even Amazon itself. Same deal. And don’t try matching the data to the graphs. As the screen captures show, Alexa’s Daily Reach graphs don’t backup the tables… And somebody should call Yahoo. According to Alexa, the web’s Number 1 website, is in big, big trouble.

Meanwhile, player roadkill captured the essence of the moment for the Alexadex community:

Refresh! Still nothing.
When will I get today’s fix?
Refresh! Still nothing.

Luckily, Alexadexers finally started getting their update fixes at around 1 pm Monday.

The rest of us aren’t so lucky. Those visiting the Mother Ship, Alexa.com, were still perplexed Tuesday morning.

Staffing problem? Change of plans? Who knows? As of this writing, Amazon isn’t talking.

Update: Email Battles alerted Amazon to the problem at 10 am CST. At 1:40 pm CST Amazon’s Drew Herdener called to officially declare the crisis “fixed.”

When asked to describe what happened, Herdener responded, “I’m sorry, it’s against Amazon policy to disclose that.”

Nevertheless, Herdener assured us that, if we need non-answers to questions in the future, he’ll be happy to help.