US Amazon.com Website Down For Over 1 Hour 228
CorporalKlinger writes "CNET News is reporting that Amazon's US website, Amazon.com, has been unreachable since 10:30 AM PDT today. As of posting, visiting www.amazon.com produces an 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable' message. According to CNET, "Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average." Some of Amazon's international websites still appear to be working, and some pages on the US Amazon.com site load if accessed using HTTPS instead of HTTP."
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This will surely help (Score:5, Insightful)
Only exceptions would be if there was a lot of heavy content being served on each page turn, saturation of one's uplink is a possibility - 10Gb links to the backbone aren't that common as yet, and CDNs like Akamai helps alleviate a good portion of that traffic.
My totally unsubstantiated guess is there was some DNS fooage that directed sites to a down cluster or possibly a screwed up CDN leg, but I'll be interested to see what's truly up.
sloth jr
How much lost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if accurate, that's assuming everyone who sees the error message will go somewhere else to buy their books.
I imagine some people would just wait to buy the book from amazon later when it is up again (probably very soon).
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OH NOES (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd have to factor in the ratio of income from the
US site v others (UK, etc.). IMHO, the US site is likely to be more profitable than others. You'd have to plow through an annual report to really know, and factor that in.
The larger flaw, though, is that you're subtracting one minute, when the title states > 1 hour. That implies going on A couple of million US$ in losses, which is significant, as investors don't know the reason, and caution would indicate that it could be recurring, such as the problems SalesForce has had. That hit their stock prices, etc.
The Amazon outage is more complex--TFA indicates that some of their services were unavailable for different amounts of time, etc. What are those service worth? All anyone has is a number--from CNET. Did they do anything like a real analysis, reading quarterly reports, etc? No, by long odds. Amazon does application hosting. What customers were affected, what percentage of the business is involved, and what do CxOs of large clients think?
The odds are actually quite good that many people give a crap. Investors (and CxOs) don't like uncertainty. It wouldn't surprise me to find some Wall Street analyst(s) making calls. Maybe it was an outage on a critical replication server, problem identified, fixed, and will provably never happen again. But maybe not. We'll see.
$31,000 per minute! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:$31,000 per minute! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they will frequently come back, yes. But the site being down also affects consumer confidence in a big way and that will make fewer people likely to go to the site.
So, using the metric of exactly how much you sell in a given time period is likely inaccurate, but I suspect the actual impact is higher, not lower.
Re:This will surely help (Score:5, Insightful)
Digg sends far more traffic to a site than Slashdot does (obviously it wasn't always this way). And digg's traffic isn't particularly noteworthy to a site of any reasonable size. (Say, Ars Technica, nevermind amazon.)
Yahoo Buzz, on the other hand, sends *huge* amounts of traffic, noticeable to sites like, again, Ars but again no disruptions of service*. But I doubt that amazon would even hiccup. If you think slashdot would even be a blip on amazon's radar, you have some serious delusions about 1) slashdot's size 2) amazon's size or 3) both.
* According to one of the devs.
Re:AWS and EC2 (Score:3, Insightful)
I know it's been running fine, I happen to use AWS.
But for business purposes, that fact isn't going to matter much to a PHB. What a PHB is going to remember is "Gee, didn't they have a serious outage a little while ago... better use something else!" Even if the best solution is, in fact, AWS + EC2.
Perception is more important than reality in business, unfortunately.
Re:$31,000 per minute! (Score:3, Insightful)
C'mon, how many people are really going to stop buying from Amazon because their website was down for a few hours on June 6, 2008?
Re:Beer on the server? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not like there are a lot of alternatives out there. Sure, some specialized places might fill part of the bill, but once you've become accustomed to Amazon, you more or less stick with em.
Re:This will surely help (Score:4, Insightful)