Amazon Collapses Under Weight of 1,000 Xboxes

theodp writes "Is there such a thing as a BusinessWeek Cover Jinx? Amazon was bitten by the success of its 1,000 Xboxes for $100 promotion, which brought the entire site to its knees for about 15 minutes on Thanksgiving Day. Singing the too-much-traffic blues on Black Friday were Wal-Mart and Disney."

Re:No Chance

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there was. I heard rumors that going directly to the ip would have it load. I imagine that disabling images and what not would improve your chances. Simple common sense stuff, but nothing that would give anyone a guarantee. Alas, it was fate that sold these things.

Even the apple store

[c0nst]

Apple relatively rare deals on iPods bought store was down for a couple of hours today.

Re:Typical

[Bluesy21]

Typically when a company does something that negatively effects you or your department, you're going to feel that they wouldn't have done it if they had their facts straight. Or, they just don't realize how it effects us. Or wah, wah, wah.

I'm not trying to put you down, because I know exactly how you feel and a lot of times react the same way as you have. However, thats not the way the "big wigs" are going to look at it. If the head of Marketing has a "great" idea they are going to make sure it happens regardless of how the techies or most anyone else feels about it. Now, I agree with you that if the two departments were in communication with one another on what was happening that there would have been some compensation for the expected extra traffic.

I believe these deals are bad for a different reason. The entire idea of insanely cheap promotions in stores is in the hope that people are going to buy other expensive items while in the store so that they make up for some/all of the lost profits on the deals. That just can't happen online. If you are selling something at an insanely low price online, people are just going to buy the one product and be done. As many people will do in a regular store, but at least you have them there and they have to walk around the store to get to the deals. Most store don't line up their Black(Green, or whatever we're calling it this year) Friday deals directly in front of the register so people can just grab the item and check out.

Using my top notch Slashdot analytical methods

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the fact CompUSA is running on IIS [netcraft.com], Best Buy is running Apache on Linux [netcraft.com] via Akamai and Circuit City is running SUN One [netcraft.com] via Akami, we can conclude that Comp USA's tech is half-assed, and Best Buy and Circuit City's techs may be half-assed, but Circuit City is helped by being less popular.

'beta test' ?

[Quixote]

Amazon has begun offering a service called elastic compute cloud [amazon.com] (EC2). It is designed to offer scalable computing/storage solutions designed to handle, (drumroll), traffic spikes.

Which leads me to think: was this a beta test for this EC2 system? I mean, there's no better bait for the millions of youngsters out there than a cheap top-o-the-line console. What better way to stress test your system than to have 100s of 1000s of people hit your site at the same time? If Amazon has logged the traffic data (and they'd be incredibly stupid not to), it would be a gold mine for their engineers. Eventually expect them to offer just such a service which can handle the such spikes, and pitch it to the Best Buys and Walmarts of the the world.

Re:They should have known better

[TubeSteak]

If those websites couldn't handle hordes of shoppers, I can't imagine what'd happen if someone was actively trying to blast 'em off the internet.

Seems to me like that'd have been the perfect time to launch a malicious DDOS aimed at those big online retailers. Kinda like how some jokers went around supergluing locks the night before.

Re:Typical

[Bamafan77]

That's what typically happens when marketing is out of touch with engineering. My educated guess would be that marketing droids "forgot" to mention this promotion to engineering. If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.

Eh, I don't know. A site as big as Amazon probably suffers from DOS almost daily. (In fact, an average day of legit traffic for Amazon.com would probably be indistinguishable from a DOS attack for most sites). And I'm sure Amazon has had past promotions that caused traffic surges too. I'm guessing they(including engineering) underestimated the popularity of THIS particular promotion.

Re:Typical

[FLEB]

OTOH, though, they do have your name and contact info now. You don't completely "leave the store" as easily on the Internet.

Re:Stupid promotion anyway

[asuffield]

How does Amazon think that a promotion like that would increase overall sales anyway?

Marketdroids, by and large, act like spoiled children. Attention-grabbing stunts are all they do. It works to a limited extent - insofar as it keeps people talking about Amazon. It may not be particularly effective, but nobody ever accused marketdroids of being very smart.

Re:No Chance

[Merc248]

I had two computers refreshing the page on my DSL connection (a bit redundant and counter-intuitive, I know)... took like five minutes for the page to come up.

Here's the kicker: it came up at around 11:01 AM PST. Sold out.

Re:They should have known better

[bangzilla]

Gosh - we never thought of that...! Of course if you look at the Amazon home page you'll see it's all dynamically calculated content - not static. And it wasn't the site that had the problem on Thursday anyway. Problems lay elsewhere...

Re:Typical

[DerekLyons]

That's what typically happens when marketing is out of touch with engineering. My educated guess would be that marketing droids "forgot" to mention this promotion to engineering. If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.

Ah yes, that famous conceit of IT workers... That, somehow, *they* are the ones who decides what is good for the company and what is not, based on whether or not *they* will be inconvenienced. (And of course it's never IT's fault, because they can't be bothered to find out what promotions are coming up - after all, this is the first year ever with a busy holiday shopping season.)
 
 

And of course it was the tech team which ended up spending its holidays fixing the site, not marketing.

Never mind the fact that keeping the site up is the tech teams job in the first place.

Re:Heh.

[superpulpsicle]

But look at the people's responses. A ton of people are saying it was a lie. There never was any Xbox systems at that price to begin with. It was a fake promotion? Evil Amazon??

And I suspect Microsoft wasn't alone...

[rmckeethen]

This is the email I sent to the Associated Press after they reported the $100 X-Box 360 deal in a story, but failed to mention the number of consoles Amazon had for sale at the discounted price:

Hello,

I'm writing to express my deep concerns about your story titled "Some stores begin shopping season early" by Shaila Dani, on November 24th, 2006.

My biggest concern about this piece is Dani's mention of Amazon's limited sale of deeply-discounted X-Box 360 consoles. As far as I can tell, this story appeared on Yahoo! more than an hour *after* these consoles went on sale. The story lacked specifics as to the number of consoles available on Amazon's web site, so readers had no way of knowing if they could take advantage of Amazon's discounted price once they read the piece. It appears as if Dani wrote the story to entice online readers to visit Amazon's web site in search of a 66% discount on a popular game console. This smells to me like a 'bait & switch' advertising tactic, and it makes me wonder if your news agency, or the story's writer, colluded with principles from Amazon in order to drive Internet traffic to Amazon's web site.

Shame on you Associated Press! It isn't news you're reporting anymore; this is plainly advertising, cloaked as a legitimate news piece. Thanks for contributing to the continuing degradation of journalism in the public's eye. The lack of ethical standards and plain common sense in this story makes me think your vaulted writers and associated newspaper publishers are nothing more than advertising hacks in disguise.

Re:No Chance

[blincoln]

I imagine that disabling images and what not would improve your chances.

I don't think so. When I couldn't load the page in my browser, I tried telnetting in on port 80 in order to do a raw GET of the URL. I couldn't even connect to enter the command.

Re:Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't turn out so well for Amazon when their site went down for hours.

Hours? All 0.25 of them, you mean? I mean holy shit, it says 'About 15 minutes' right there in the blurb.

Apparently I struck a nerve?

[Sneakernets]

Is it always cool to downmod when you can say so much in one word? Few things in life can be done like that. Amazon.com screwed up, which is pretty weird to me given how many people mantain and check for errors. Oops! Besides, it's pretty bad a bunch of fanboys can crash a site that should be able to resist traffic spikes. So not only was my point valid, it generated interesting conversation. apparently that deserves a 0.

Re:Heh.

[davco9200]

I completely agree -- according to the Wikipedia entry for "bait and switch" [wikipedia.org], it matches almost exactly:
A bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the fraudster lures in customers by advertising a good at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute good is. The goal of the bait-and-switch is to convince some buyers to purchase the substitute good as a means of avoiding disappointment over not getting the bait, or as a way to recover sunk costs expended to try to obtain the bait.