DealerTrack said recent upgrades to its database platform were behind two service outages in January. The first one occurred on Saturday, Jan. 26, and lasted more than two hours. The second one occurred two days later and lasted about 20 minutes.

“We are very sorry about the recent service disruption, and have taken steps to prevent it from happening again,” said Mark O'Neil, chairman and CEO of DealerTrack. “Our technology team has determined that the cause of the disruption on Jan. 26 and 28 was a configuration problem that occurred during a major upgrade in our Oracle database platform. The database has now been reconfigured, and we are confident that the system will handle dramatically higher volumes with ease. Meeting customers’ needs is our top priority, and we have made significant investments in our technology infrastructure to provide the highest possible uptime.”

In 2007, DealerTrack had 99.98 percent uptime. Cumulative downtime for the whole year was 82 minutes.

Last year, the company invested almost $15 million in capital expenditures, which included security, disaster recovery and many other things. It will make a similar level of investments this year.