The 1.2m sq ft site will include a huge office complex, and research and development facilities. The search giant will pay an initial base rent of $3.66m a year for the undeveloped land at the Nasa Ames Research Centre in Mountain View.

Google says it needs the space for the thousands of workers it expects to hire as the company expands its business. "This long-term lease agreement is a key component of Google's strategy for continued growth in Silicon Valley," says David Radcliffe, Google's vice-president of real estate and workplace services. In the last four years, Google has added more than 17,000 employees to boost its payroll to 19, 156 workers.

Several hours of downtime experienced Friday might have cost Internet retail giant Amazon (www.amazon.com) millions in lost sales.

One of the largest e-commerce site on the Internet, Amazon appeared unavailable for part of the day, its .com web address returning a message saying "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."