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."

Comments

Heh.

[Sneakernets]

One word: Oops!

Re:Heh.

[nillawafer]

A little typo, huh? An Xbox for $1,000 sounds like a rip-off.

Re:Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

An Xbox for $1,000 sounds like a rip-off.

But you'd be getting it for only $100!

Re:Heh.

[omeomi]

Is it just me, or is the first year I've really noticed any sort of competitive pricing on game systems. Generally it hasn't mattered too much where you bought your game system, because they were pretty much exactly the same price wherever you looked. But this year, I got an ad for a $100 rebate on an XBox360 from MicroCenter, and now this stunt by Amazon...

...wish I'd gotten one...

Re:Heh.

[utopianfiat]

Most things collapse under the weight of just one xbox. I'm surprised that Amazon survived as long as it did under something so hueg.

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??

Re:Heh.

[DeadBugs]

It's less competitive pricing and more "bait and switch". They are sold out of what you want, but since you are here why not look at all our other crap.

Re:Heh.

[evilgrug]

This is 2006, not 2001. You're supposed to be making "PS3 is huge/expensive/crap" or "Wii = Piss" jokes.

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.

Re:Heh.

[cowscows]

Only a retard would say that. It would make no sense at all for Amazon to fake it. Let's say they lost $200 per xbox selling them in this promotion. With 1000 boxes for sale, that's $200,000. A good chunk of change, no doubt, but not really difficult to come by for a company with a market value in the billions of dollars. They've gotten a ton of press out of it, and all for a fraction of the cost of a 30 second superbowl ad.

Sure, they could've faked it, and then just relied on an overloaded website to avoid having to give out any real deals, but why would they want to have to deal with the potential PR problems if that truth got out? It would be beyond foolish for this to have all been a scam.

Re:Heh.

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

"Troll?"

Incorrect, factually defective, lacking in spaces, and truthiness-challenged, sure... ...but "troll?"

Seriously. Who's giving out the mod points these days?

Re:Heh.

[KDR_11k]

I don't know about the US but here it's illegal to advertise a special deal (or even just a normal deal) and not stock it in any significant quantities.

Re:Heh.

[davco9200]

I completely agree -- according to the Wikipedia entry for "bait and switch", 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.

Re:Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I just bought an xbox and yup, most of the user manual is dedicated to warning users not to let it fall, as it may crush a small child. I had not seen such warnings in previous manuals (unlike the "causes epilepsy" and the "contains electricity" warnings that every console has).

They should have known better

[Salvance]

I wonder why they didn't just setup a basic html page or two for the home page in order to handle the traffic. By enabling a landing page for 15 minutes or so, they could have directed all the folks seeking these incredible deals to the correct page, instead of ensuring everyone is fed dynamic CPU-intensive pages. It's not like it's the first time that Walmart or Amazon have experienced traffic spikes.

Re:They should have known better

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Wouldn't that also defeat the purpose of the whole promotion though? I mean, if you're giving away a hundred x-boxes to drag as many people as possible to your site, and all you get out of them is 100 xBox sales, you've lost cash. It's the continued shopping that you're hoping for....

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:They should have known better

[Sigma 7]

Wouldn't that also defeat the purpose of the whole promotion though? I mean, if you're giving away a hundred x-boxes to drag as many people as possible to your site, and all you get out of them is 100 xBox sales, you've lost cash. It's the continued shopping that you're hoping for....

It's not that difficult to hard-code "People who buy X-Boxes also purchase" into the .HTML description page. Granted, it might not be optimal, but it works enough - at the very least, include links to hard-coded pages that show a list of common (or well-hyped) X-Box games.

Even so, just because someone makes a one-time purchase of an XBox doesn't automatically mean money is lost. As soon as they make the purchase (and it turns out perfectly), it will add one more voice to the group of people who wonder why the "Amazon Suxors" site exists.

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...

No Chance

[Renraku]

There was almost no chance at getting one of these. The site was completely and utterly unresponsive between 1:56PM EST and 2:09PM EST. When a page loaded at 2:09PM, it was sold out.

It would have been different if at 2:00:23PM EST it said it was sold out, but not. It might as well not have been on there at all, because getting that deal was pretty much impossible. I wonder how many of the winners were on Amazon's network?

Re:No Chance

[RuBLed]

well, the article said it was sold out in 29 seconds.. so yes.. there is no chance...

Re:No Chance

[11223]

No more than 999 were on Amazon's network. I got one.

I had two networks to choose from: Comcast cable modem, and a supposedly "slower" SBC DSL connection. I ended up using the DSL as Amazon went unreachable on the cable modem at 5 till 1 (CST). At 1:00, Amazon was taking 10-20 seconds to load, but it did load. I clicked, answered a simple math question ("what's 18 + 19" IIRC), and it gave me the "you've got it" page.

I'm still shocked I got it, especially since I'm in Chicago, not on the west coast.

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.

Re:No Chance

[Anonymous Coward]

I could not get it to load until 11:15 PST. I started about 10:54 PST. My dad got it to actually load a page at 11:01 PST and it indicated the Xbox had sold out. To me it was a joke.

Re:No Chance

[spookmonkey]

I was able to get one as well. For me it was a matter of what browser I used. Safari & Camino wouldn't load the site at all, but Firefox worked just fine. However, once I got the discount code, I had to wait about an hour to check out because the entire site became unresponsive.

Re:No Chance

[Main Gauche]

"I imagine that disabling images and what not would improve your chances. Simple common sense stuff,"

Disabling images is common sense... until they throw a captcha (or other critical graphic) at you that you need to see to claim the prize.

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: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:No Chance

[Crysalim]

You are the first person I have seen claim they got the code. I didn't believe anyone did until now, but that's only because I also was able to make it to the question link...

...but when I answered the question (19 + 6), it turned me down. It was incredibly frustrating, because I was under the impression that I had already received a claim code (this is what the buying tips page said), and it was waiting for me to answer that question.


Screenshots: (1) The question | (2) The denial

Re:No Chance

[rbarreira]

Then you just right click and press "show image".

Re:No Chance

[ben there...]

Disabling images likely wouldn't do anything. For one thing, the page would load with a placeholder for the missing image anyway. Also, the images are on a different server, so loading them doesn't even slow down the page you're trying to load. FlashBlock might have helped, as flash ads can cause the tables they're in not to reflow until the ad is loaded on some pages with tables. And using the IP instead of the domain name likely would have helped, because it may have been their DNS server that got overloaded.

Re:No Chance

[ergo98]

You are the first person I have seen claim they got the code.

Only 1000 people got the code. 1000 is a very small number, and it's unlikely that many of those 1000 happen to visit the same online hangouts that you do.

This whole thing is rather absurd (I'm speaking more to comments on the linked page rather to your specific comment - excuse me while I blather) - a bunch of people got their hopes up, against tremendous odds (it wasn't a small number of people who knew about this deal. I was at lunch and a lunchmate, who I thought was entirely unconnected with technology, commented that they had to get back to the office to get their "$100 xbox360"), and when they didn't "win" therefore the whole thing must be a giant scam, etc. Or...maybe, just maybe, 1000 other people beat them to it, among hundreds of thousands of people trying for the same thing.

[Checking lottery ticket]

OH MAN I DIDN'T WIN! THIS IS BULLSHIT! THE WHOLE THING IS A GIANT SCAM!

Re:No Chance

[The_mad_linguist]

[Checking lottery ticket]

OH MAN I DIDN'T WIN! THIS IS BULLSHIT! THE WHOLE THING IS A GIANT SCAM!

What? You didn't know that already?

The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.

Re:No Chance

[Harry_Ballsak]

The same thing happened to me, I refreshed the site at 12:57pm Central time and by the time the site loaded up again at 1:10pm the deal was gone. The way this works is that when a request is made, the site will only fulfill a certain quantity of them, the rest will just time out like it happened to us. Although I was not happy it's just the way it is, I also heard that anyone who used the secure address (https://) went through just fine.

Re:No Chance

[ergo98]

The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.

And this statement comes only from those who have no concept of risk/reward. e.g. That it can be entirely rational to "risk" $2 if you're not strapped for cash when the unlikely but remotely possible reward is millions.

I'm not even a lottery player, but I do find it rather laughable when the condescending, patronizing sort gives a spiel about odds regarding the lottery, confidently boasting about their own intellectual superiority because they shun such a thing.

Re:No Chance

[heinousjay]

It's not the people who can afford and buy an occasional ticket that I railed against specifically, although the fact that they support such an evil, exploitative system makes me sick to my stomach. No, it's the people who are giving their money away when they can barely afford to buy food and shelter that worry me. It's a false dream, heavily advertised and targeted to the people who can least afford it.

It's not about being smug and superior, it's about being moral.

Re:No Chance

[masada555]

I got one. Still can't believe it. Had the U.S. atomic clock in one tab and reloaded the page at 1:59:59 EST. Answered the question (20 + 16) and that was it. Didn't have to enter my password or anythiing. Didn't get a claim code, except through email as a backup. Just added it to my shopping cart and checked out. Well, I tried to check out. The site was inaccessible for 15-20 minutes and I was sweatin' heavy. But I bought it immediately when the site came back up. It shipped today.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

And this statement comes only from those who have no concept of risk/reward. e.g. That it can be entirely rational to "risk" $2 if you're not strapped for cash when the unlikely but remotely possible reward is millions.

This is quite possibly the least informed statement I have ever read here. If you have defended the lottery with "payment for a bit of a thrill", you might have a valid point. However, attacking those with "no concept of risk/reward" is more than a little bit of a projection. Feel free to look in the mirror, point and laugh. I bet you think you save money by doing your own taxes, too.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

And using the IP instead of the domain name likely would have helped, because it may have been their DNS server that got overloaded.

no. That's silly thinking.

Re:No Chance

[ergo98]

This is quite possibly the least informed statement I have ever read here

Hyperbole much?

However, attacking those with "no concept of risk/reward" is more than a little bit of a projection.

Yes, it's a projection, genius.

Funny thing is that I don't play the lottery, but if you simply think of a $10 million dollar jackpot as 5,000,000x$2, you've, exactly as I mentioned, completely missed the whole point of risk/reward. The risk of $2 is negligible to many people's lifestyle (less than a good cup of coffee), for a potential, but remarkably unlikely, reward that is enormous.

Re:No Chance

[ergo98]

No, it's the people who are giving their money away when they can barely afford to buy food and shelter that worry me. It's a false dream, heavily advertised and targeted to the people who can least afford it.

Certainly don't disagree with this. Personally I find it reprehensible that governments not only sanction it, but they're the ones advertising and pushing it.

Having said that, at least in my area the "profits" go towards good causes (libraries, youth athletics, etc), at least marginally making up for the damage it causes.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

Whoosh. By your line of thought, the only reason you don't play the lottery is that you don't make enough money. Absolute brilliance.

Twice now you've failed to rationally explain your unique vision of risk reward. Ah, maybe you simply don't understand the word rational. Yes, that must be it. Hey, why don't you reply again with your argument that $2 is very little money and therefore no matter how low the chances and how short a human life is, there is still a viable risk/reward scenario.

Who thinks that $10m is 5m x $2? Basically you aren't doing the math if you think that that reward is enormous compared to the risk you are taking and the odds you are getting. You are not correct, yet you attack people that are. Pretty arrogant.

Whether the best is $2 or 1 penny, whether the reward is $1 or $100 Billion, if you ignore the odds, you have not setup a viable risk/reward scenario.

Re:No Chance

[ergo98]

Whoosh.

Indeed, right over your head.

By your line of thought, the only reason you don't play the lottery is that you don't make enough money.

Whoosh!

You are not correct, yet you attack people that are. Pretty arrogant.

Whoosh!

Whether the best is $2 or 1 penny, whether the reward is $1 or $100 Billion, if you ignore the odds, you have not setup a viable risk/reward scenario.

Whoosh!

Who said anything about ignoring the odds? The point, my dear moron, is that even if the odds are 1 in 13 million, the risk/reward for many people is well justified spending $2 for a $10 million jackpot (despite the purely mathematical break even point being, duh duh, $26 million). It's a fundamental disassociation that some autistics and asperger suffers just cannot make themselves understand.

Again, though. Whoosh!

Re:No Chance

[chaboud]

The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.Where does this come from? I've spouted it before (when I was much younger), but it's just wrong.

The lottery is:
A. A tax on people who want to dream so much that they wouldn't do math if they could.
B. Perfect for people who can do math.

Look at it this way. Much like blackjack, the lottery is a game with history, in which the odds/payoff ratio varies over time. If you bet the same amount every time you play, you'll end up losing out (the payout on the lottery doesn't climb as quickly as the money that goes in). However, if you wait to play until the payout is large enough (and these days, that's quite large), your dollar played is worth, probabalistically, more than one dollar.

You don't even have to deal with the risk of getting tossed out of a casino.

Yes, I understand that the lottery attracts a great number of low-income purchasers and is, as state-advertised gambling, wildly hypocritical in many places. Still, from a purely academic perspective, it suits mathematicians just fine.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

Way to act like a 12 year old loser. You have no idea what you are talking about. Before you use words you don't understand, I suggest you read about game theory. Nice of you to resort again to attacking me and actual facts instead of bringing a real argument to the table. You need to go back to jerking off because you are obviously no good at this.

Re:No Chance

[ergo98]

Way to act like a 12 year old loser.

Uh huh.

Nice of you to resort again to attacking me and actual facts instead of bringing a real argument to the table

Completely over your head.

Oh, and let me guess - home insurance is a scam, right? I mean the premium xs the statistical period loss definitely makes it a losers game, right?

Idiot.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

Oh, and let me guess - home insurance is a scam, right? I mean the premium xs the statistical period loss definitely makes it a losers game, right?

Even a retarded monkey wouldn't confuse a risk-reward scenario with a risk alleviation scenario. You make me laugh. Why do you even try? You keep falling on your face. Once again, no argument, simply utterly stupid comments.

Re:No Chance

[ergo98]

Even a retarded monkey wouldn't confuse a risk-reward scenario with a risk alleviation scenario.

Bwahahahaha. I guess you haven't even achieved the level of retarded monkey (though "alleviation"? Now there's a key piece of terminology that pretty clearly delineates your knowledge).

Actually, my dear idiot, the same concept applies to both, although the monetary balance flips. A small expenditure for an incredibly unlikely great reward shares startling fundamentals with a relatively small expenditure for an unlikely great risk. In both cases you are a net loser, but one would have to be a startling idiot to say that home insurance is only for people who are bad at math.

Hey, chalk that one off - the sub retarded monkey has that one covered.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

Actually, my dear idiot, the same concept applies to both, although the monetary balance flips. A small expenditure for an incredibly unlikely great reward shares startling fundamentals with a relatively small expenditure for an unlikely great risk. In both cases you are a net loser, but one would have to be a startling idiot to say that home insurance is only for people who are bad at math.

You really don't put any thought into your replies, do you? People that pay for home insurance do so because they cannot afford the risk, WHICH IS VERY REAL. I.e. A high probability relative to winning the lottery. As that risk decreases, the number of people carrying the insurance drops.

You apparently believe that people in Kansas should buy insurance against icebergs.

Me, I feel that taking the odds of an occurrence happening in addition to the "great risk" and the "small expenditure". You have taken the side that the odds don't matter.

Additionally, those who can afford to cover a large loss SELF INSURE because it is overall more profitable. Obviously, you are not in that situation or it would have occurred to you. I hope you become successful, though any success will obviously not be based on critical thinking. Your brand of logic smarts of amateur emulation of Limbaugh or Hannity... it sounds great on its face, but cannot stand up to inspection. Your only success can only come at being critical (however incorrectly) of others while contributing zilch yourself.

Oh, and your repetition of "my dear idiot" shows you as terribly uncreative. Your writing smacks of arrogance (as I said earlier and you have proven that out again and again) and of a fragile psyche. In this particular situation you are wrong, and the sooner you admit it, the sooner you can get on with life, you chowder head.

Hey, chalk that one off - the sub retarded monkey has that one covered.

*sigh* your writing style has made this sentence unintelligible. Your antecedents have become thoroughly lost.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

A mathematician would look at his Expected Value as it pertains to game theory. As such, yes it may be that in certain situations there is +EV, but they don't exist in reality. This is due to the fact that MORE people would play, cutting down on what you could possibly win (splitting pots, etc).

If there ever comes a time when there is +EV for a play in the lottery, then I guarantee that the lottery would cease to exist -- the pot would change. The people running the lottery kinda pay attention to that. Academically, the lottery is very interesting, however in the real world, no mathematician would ever put money on the line expecting +EV.

Let me re-phrase the joke for you that once made sense when you were young: Anyone that pays for a lottery ticket ever expecting more money back is not good at math as the lottery is designed to be a -EV situation.

Re:No Chance

[ergo98]

You apparently believe that people in Kansas should buy insurance against icebergs.
Somehow I think the odds of icebergs causing damage in Kansas to be somewhat shy of 1 in 13 million. Having said that, plenty of people engage in insurance where the cost would be very high, but the premium would be low. A good example would be corporate contests where there's a very large prize, but an extremely unlikely probability that someone will claim. Guess what: Taco Bell is calling up Lloyds regardless, because insurance still makes sense.
Your writing smacks of arrogance
No one else is reading this, and I reply only out of humor. I am, however, right, and you are wrong. One day you will realize this. Human motivation isn't linear across a monetary scale, and this demonstrates itself frequently.
*sigh* your writing style has made this sentence unintelligible
Whoosh!

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

Somehow I think the odds of icebergs causing damage in Kansas to be somewhat shy of 1 in 13 million.

And that brings us full circle to my point: The odds need to be taken into consideration.

Thank you,

QED

Re:No Chance

[chaboud]

That's just plainly not true. The sad thing is that the number of tickets purchased is not wildly responsive to the expected value of that play. It's responsive, but not as much as it should be in a strictly rational sense. Who wants to wait?

It's utter nonsense to say that "MORE people would play," to cover your bases on this one. Yes, more people will play, but that is merely a pressure on the game. It is not a forced constraint. In John Corbett and Charlie Geyer's writeup based on expected play of Powerball here, they came to an expected monetary value of $0.9651 with a $300MM jackpot and 80MM expected plays, accounting for the probability of other jackpot winners (all other prizes are non-shared).

Powerball has gone to $365MM. Even giving completely conservative numbers a run (cash payout of $171MM, even though a $314MM jackpot had a cash payout of $170MM, 100MM plays on that jackpot), we come to an expected monetary value of $1.07 on a $1 play. Don't say that something doesn't happen in reality when that very thing has happened in reality already. With the record payout, there might have even been a positive expected value after taxes. I hate doing my own taxes, though, so why would I bother running the numbers on someone else's?

Your sort of vague argument could be made against counting cards in blackjack, that the game must be constructed with a negative expected value at all times, but that is not the case. The game is constructed with a negative expected value (for the suckers/players) over the span of all plays.

Yes, I've done my homework on game theory, and I understand that it is very rare that one can consider coming out ahead with the lottery. Still, the suggestion that it isn't functionally possible to have a positive expected value for the game in the real world is just false.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

I did neglect the fact that in certain situations, the value will exceed the odds. That's a good point. So yes, at certain points in time EV goes positive. (assuming odds of picking powerball winning numbers is 146,000,000:1. [5 from a bucket of 55 balls, 1 from a bucket of 42 => (5!/(55*54*53*52*51))*(1/42)] )

However, this is also simplifying in looking at a single all or nothing scenario, meaning that it would take many many iterations before this would hold true. However, the number of bets needed to make EV useful exceeds the number of opportunities you will have in your lifetime. Thank you for pointing out my oversight an generalization, though.

Re:No Chance

[pboulang]

oops, also you forgot to include taxes in your calculations. It was so long since my original post, I forgot we were talking reality vs academic, and taxes are so very very real :(

So, the number of times the payout * .4 (fed + state) > $146MM is even lower. Your $365MM big win drops to about $185MM lump then $111MM. So, you can only play in situations where the published number is what, $480MM?

Nevertheless, your point that the lottery can in some situations will have +EV still stands. You just are never in a position to take advantage of it.

Re:No Chance

[chaboud]

Don't forget the $0.1971 fixed expected value of the ticket (also subject to taxes). If we neglect taxes on small prizes (do you report $3?), one need merely have an after-tax lump-sum of ~$117MM.

I think it's safe to say that we're both safe from winning (or playing) the lottery any time soon.

Re:Cause And Effect ?

[AKAImBatman]

They were selling 1,000 XBox 360s for only $100 a piece. The deal started at exactly 2PM EST, the exact period of time Amazon went down. Entire forums of people were sitting and refreshing the pages. It was pretty easy to gauge what the cause was. :-/

The article is missing the Amazon link!!!!

[Wolfier]

here evil grin

Re:The article is missing the Amazon link!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The traffic you send to amazon.com from slashdot won't make a dent in amazon's traffic, retard.

Re:The article is missing the Amazon link!!!!

[DeadBugs]

Don't forget the shameless self-promotion that started this all. Use a referral link like this... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/pr ime1-20

Re:The article is missing the Amazon link!!!!

[LordKronos]

I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I do disagree a bit with how you got there. Doesn't alexa base their statistics on people who have their toolbar installed? I believe that people who frequent slashdot are probably a bit more finicky about what toolbars they install in their browser than are amazon's typical visitors.

You want the blues?

[AltGrendel]

How about this? Talk about one stupid seller.

. The guy will probably protest it though.

Re:You want the blues?

[MBC1977]

Now that is an individual who should resell that for 2000 dollars and make a killer profit.

And for the seller... Sucks to Be You!!

Re:You want the blues?

[sottitron]

The auction states to contact the seller for shipping fees. The seller should have just charged $2K for shipping.

Re:You want the blues?

[cgenman]

Lots of online retailers have put up items at mistakenly low prices, only to retract later. It's not at all uncommon. They refund your money, and keep the goods.

I forget what the legal defense of this position was, but it seemed airtight. Anyone remember offhand?

Re:You want the blues?

[unother]

Almost as funny (for different reasons) was this guy selling a PS3.

Check out some of the pictures. What's with the fish?

Re:You want the blues?

[MarkRose]

This is eBay we're talking about. You missed the unspecified $3000 in shipping. Pwned!

Re:You want the blues?

[DietFluffy]

the legal defense is "mistake"

Re:You want the blues?

[ptn2]

IANAL. a sale contract is formed by an offer to sell and an acceptance of that offer. where someone advertises that he is selling many widgets, courts interpret that as a solicitation for offers. so the buyer comes down and makes the "offer" and the seller is the one who "accepts." this is what happens when amazon has a price mistake and responds with "whoops, we're not going to be able to accept these offers." however, where there is only one (or a defined number) of the item advertised for sale, and at fairly definite terms, then courts are willing to find that that advertisement constitutes the offer, and the buyer accepts the offer by attempting to pay. that's the case with an ebay buy it now. that being said, what's legally correct isn't always what happens in the real world, so fat chance that this guy gets his $.99 ps3.

Re:You want the blues?

[ptn2]

i shouldn't have posted yet. in this case, that the buyer had reason to know that the seller was making a mistake with the price, since it's so out of line from other ebay auctions. given that, if a contract is formed, it is still voidable at the seller's option.

Re:You want the blues?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Germany it's

118 BGB ("lack of sincerity")
and/or
119 BGB ("defeasibility by reason of mistake")

These are quite common bases for defeasibility.

Inconsistancy

[Genocaust]

So was Amazon selling 1,000 XBOX systems at $100? Or selling a $1,000 XBOX system at $100?

Re:Inconsistancy

[Sneakernets]

Well, think about it. if you wanted an Xbox 360, which choice would make you visit amazon.com to check it out?

Re:Inconsistancy

[edschurr]

Obviously anyone would go for the thousand Xboxes for only $100. You could make $400,000 easy.

Re:Inconsistancy

[Genocaust]

Amazon was bitten by the success of its $1,000 Xboxes for $100 promotionIt's been fixed since earlier ;)

Typical

[slobber]

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.

And of course it was the tech team which ended up spending its holidays fixing the site, not marketing. (You can probably tell that I am taking it a bit personally and for a reason...)

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.

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

[timeOday]

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.

Do you have some reason to think this was not a successful promotion? The fact that the website got slow is probably as discouraging to Amazon as the fact that people waited in line for a week to get a PS3 was to Sony.

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: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:Typical

[edschurr]

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.

You would have IT poll the state of Amazon constantly rather than have them receive a message!? IT has other things to do.

Re:Typical

[sholden]

That's right. And when marketing decides to promote their great new idea of teleporting a new Xbox down your internet connection so you don't have to wait for shipping, screw the tech losers who claim that will be hard for them to do.

They can work a weekend to write the code...

Re:Typical

[Cassini2]

Either that, or engineering couldn't figure out if they would rather complain about the promotion, or try to win the promotion!

Re:Typical

[Blakey Rat]

A competitor of Amazon's, woot.com, runs a promotion like this every single day for some overstocked items, selling them at sometimes ridiculous prices. They also go down almost every single day, from my experience, in the same way Amazon.com did. I think you reach a certain point of traffic spike, and it's just not possible to compensate it. The Slashdot Effect is nothing compared to the "I want cheap shit" effect... look at Wal-Mart, for instance.

Even the apple store

[c0nst]

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

THIS should be a Slashdot story... Submit it

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the buyer asking if the contract is binding including an email from the seller.

Re:THIS should be a Slashdot story... Submit it

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is legally binding does it really matter? Is he going to spend thousands in legal fees to have a proxy represent him in civil litigation out of state? I doubt it.

Re:THIS should be a Slashdot story... Submit it

[triclipse]

He could always just sue him in small claims court (no attorneys allowed). He would lose, but he could do it.

..and now this!

[TheSpatulaOfLove]

Jeez - You would've thought they were selling Bags Of Crap with the way that server went down...



On a serious note. They knew this was coming. It was marketed heavily and they should be ashamed for not being prepared to handle the onslaught of refreshers.

Re:..and now this!

[Firehed]

They probably were about as prepared as they could have been. Sometimes, doubling your fleet of servers for a single known traffic spike just isn't a viable choice. Especially if the reason for the traffic spike is a loss leader to begin with.

Stupid promotion anyway

[iendedi]

How does Amazon think that a promotion like that would increase overall sales anyway? What they should have done is said that XBoxs will be onsale randomly throughout the day, so check the price from time to time to see if you are a lucky recipient of the sales price. There will be 100 randomly allocated sales items to customers each hour until the promotion ends.

That would bring more traffic to their website and keep it there all day. Much better idea!

Oh wait... Hmm....

Re:Stupid promotion anyway

[chis101]

A 24-hour DDOS instead of a 24 minute one.

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:Stupid promotion anyway

[YoungHack]

I'm not sure it wasn't effective. I'm a regular Amazon user, but I'll admit that all of the buzz about promotions and specials had me checking back way more often than I would normally visit the site. I haven't made many purchases, but I've added a lot of things to my wishlist that might become future purchases.

Re:Stupid promotion anyway

[Ginger Unicorn]

Well, since it's their job to attract attention to a product, I would say they are professionals doing their job, rather than spoiled children. Just because their job description is to pander to human stupidity doesn't mean they themselves are stupid.

Add onto the "Black Friday Blues" list...

[Avillia]

CompUSA and Best Buy. Black Friday must be a living nightmare for the half-assed tech staff shopping stores must hire to some extent.

Surprisingly enough, Circuit City loaded perfectly fine. Does this say something about it's popularity, or it's hiring practices for IT?

Re:Add onto the "Black Friday Blues" list...

[Behrooz]

My roommate works at best buy. He went in at 3AM this morning, and came home at 9PM tonight.

18 hours. Not bad for non-government work...

Re:Add onto the "Black Friday Blues" list...

[Anonymous Coward]

...except for those that were paying attention, Best Buy started selling their Black Friday specials online THURSDAY night. No line, no waiting, no having insane grandmothers threaten to cut you if you don't get out of their way. Muahahahaha.

Re:Beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

Ping is blocked by Amazon's firewall.

price

[jest3r]

I'd buy an XBOX 360 for $100 .. heck I'd buy 10.

Using my top notch Slashdot analytical methods

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the fact CompUSA is running on IIS, Best Buy is running Apache on Linux via Akamai and Circuit City is running SUN One 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.

Woot.com happens all the time.

[tecker]

Ehh. This is nothing new. You should see Woot.com after they throw up a Bag-o-Crap on the site during a "wootoff". Their site at least says "Server is to Busy". Maybe Amazon.com should have thought twice before deciding to do a stunt like that.

Hey wait a second. When was the last time a Microsoft product cause a VOLUNTARY distributed denial of service attack?

Re:Woot.com happens all the time.

[Blakey Rat]

I know you're trying to do some snarky Microsoft-bashing, but the last time was about two days ago when Slashdot posted that the number of people downloading movies and TV shows from Xbox Live was overloading Microsoft's servers because they didn't anticipate the demand.

Morons... That's What They Get For...

[Anonymous Coward]

using Ruby on Rails to do their site - IT DOESN'T SCALE!

oh wait.

Apple Store too?

[sakusha]

I haven't been able to get into the Apple Store tonight, it's been down all evening. They had a big one-day sale today, I bought a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse ($11 off, yay!) this afternoon and now I can't back get in to check the order status.

I've never heard of the Apple Store going down under a high load, but it often goes down briefly when product or price changes are made. I figure it didn't go down due to high traffic, but this is a rather long outage, compared to most updates. But still, it should be giving a "down for updates" err msg instead of a generic WebObjects error page.

Re:Apple Store too?

[sakusha]

The Apple Store just came back online, and yep, it looks like it was excessive traffic that killed it. It came back online with the one-day sale still in place. Usually they only go offline to add or remove content like this. Usually WebObjects is pretty robust under heavy loads.

And whoever moderated the parent as offtopic, please RTFSubmission, it talked about Amazon AND WalMart AND Disney going offline due to heavy traffic. These online stores are the big guns and if they go down on Black Friday, it's news, and relevant to this topic.

The engineers may also be at fault.

[Anonymous Coward]

The engineers behind a website as well-known and popular as amazon.com should have developed a system that could successfully handle a large, unexpected amount of traffic. At the very least, their system could have failed gracefully, rather than just shitting out like it did.

Blame marketing all you want. But part of engineering is taking the unexpected into account, and making sure your system can handle virtually whatever is thrown at it. And if something arises that it can't handle, it should be able to detect this, and fail in a way that minimizes the cost of failure (ie. the site isn't completely unavailable for 15 minutes).

'beta test' ?

[Quixote]

Amazon has begun offering a service called elastic compute cloud (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:'beta test' ?

[Poromenos1]

If their grid of who-knows-how-many computers couldn't handle serving pages, who's going to want to use it for other stuff?

Re:'beta test' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell does that comment get moderated as +5 insightful? It is a guess, nothing more, and a pretty stupid one, considering most websites are 'brought to their knees' by a lack of bandwidth, not computing power.

You could put IBM's latest and greatest supercomputer on the far side of a DSL connection, and easily bring a website it was running 'to it's knees'.

Re:'beta test' ?

[Quixote]

It was moderated " interesting ", not "insightful", you retard.

Re:'beta test' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the time stamps -- ever think it could be rated "insightful" when I posted 3 hours before you?

Now who's the retard?

Re:'beta test' ?

[westyx]

If they wanted to test their grid-of-who-knows-how-many-computers to find bottlenecks and issues before the holiday season, what better way to test it?

Slashdot

[jrmiller84]

Now let's see of they can survive a slashdotting!

Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[ConfusedSelfHating]

No I don't have proof, but having the most prominent retail website in the world hawk your product is worth a lot of cash. The $100 special gets reported by multiple media sources, "1000 Xbox 360s sell out in 9 minutes", "Demand for Xbox 360s brings down Amazon's website". If Sony wants the headlines of people going crazy about the PS3, why wouldn't Microsoft want the same? Does anyone believe that 10 minutes of poor connectivity will hurt a website's reputation? Server problems yes, super cheap deals no. "Oh no, too many people are coming to our website for the great, great deals!" People are going to associate Amazon's name with amazing one time sales, which is only going to help them. Both Microsoft and Amazon have benefited from this sale.

Re:Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[lilfields]

To make it more ironic IBM developed the Xbox 360 processors, so the story could go like: "1000 Xbox 360s powered by IBM processors sell out in 9 minutes bringing down Amazon.com...IBM claims HP powered servers were the cause of the site's shortfall..." In follow up story: "IBM finally reeps profits from it's patent one-click-shopping through Amazon.com without going to court"

Re:Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[Anonymous Coward]

It was less than 1 minute that it sold out. I tried to get one. Page stopped being loadable for me at 12:58 (CST) and wasn't loadable until 1:01 (CST) at which point they were sold out. Some of the people over on DealsPl.us think that Amazon didn't have any and the outage at that time was caused by them so it looked like people were picking them up. I don't really buy into that conspiracy theory, but just throwing it out there.

Speaking of things selling out, my local GameStop sold out of their supply of Wiis and had more than double the number they were given for the second shipment (and for some reason they had a second shipment while Circuit City, Target, and Wal-Mart all got nothing... which actually makes me think they held back some of their launch units for release on black friday... just to make me wake up early and wait in the cold to wind up empty handed... luckily my younger brother managed to get one on launch so at least I can get some of my Zelda fix in before Thanksgiving Break ends...)

Re:Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[Nightspirit]

Except amazon users voted which special they wanted. Sure, the other offers were crap, and didn't have much chance of getting voted for, but then you're suggesting MS paid amazon to have a "potential" sale, which may never happen. Sounds way too tin foil for my tastes.

And I doubt amazon even lost much money. Supposedly MS are now making $70 profit for the premium system, and likely much more for the core system. Seeing how some retailers are dropping $60-$100 off the premium package already (dell.com for instance, once you put it in the shopping cart) I would expect a retail price drop in 3-6 months, probably $360 for the premium (what dell is currently selling it for) and $260 for the core.

Re:Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[Machtyn]

And no one had to get shot or mugged while purchasing, or waiting to purchase, one.

Re:Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[Stealth Potato]

9 minutes? No fricking way. They were sold out within 30 seconds. I know because I managed to get through their confirmation page at 11:00:30AM PST, and I got the "sold out" message. I live near Seattle, so the worst I had was waiting about ten seconds for each page to load.

Actually, I managed to get the confirmation page by 11:00:15, but I somehow didn't notice a little "I agree to these terms" checkbox before I clicked through. The confirmation failed, and I had to do it again. If it wasn't for that extra 15 seconds, I might've got one. :-(

Re:Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[metamatic]

Mmm, illegal dumping by a convicted monopolist. Tasty.

Re:Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[ahoehn]

Nine Minutes? I finally got through at 11:02, 2 minutes after the sale supposedly went live, and they were all sold out.

Re:Cause And Effect ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Click on the "parent" link bozo.

Collapse

[Psychotria]

The fact that the Amazon jungle has collapsed under the weight of a thousand boxes surprises me little. In fact I thought the number would have been more. Boxes to transport wood, made of... wood... it's no wonder really. This is a sad day. The diversity of species in the Amazon is huge. The fact that it has collapsed is worrying to say the least. This is likely to result in a whole series of follow-on effects: Global Warming will quicken; The ice-caps will melt; The Ozone Hole will become a non-issue (the hole will be so big, we'll start calling normal bits of sky the Ozone Zones). I have no idea why nobody thought of the children.

Re:Collapse

[tmasssey]

I'm really surprised that you didn't mention the tubes...

Re:Collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Amazon has 5.5 million square kilometres of forest and you compare that to 1000 Xboxes!! Surely the total mass of 1000 XBoxes would crush the Amazon Rainforest and all its life!

Seems to be right, last time I checked they were around 5.5 thousand sqkm each, just enough!

Ah, that's the true reason for one-click

[tlhIngan]

Because if everyone had to keep clicking through the checkout process, every transaction would add another 3 or 4 page loads. One click is merely a way to avoid these extra page loads and not bring down the server too often.

That, and it also explains why there's no link in the story - we don't want to slashdot Amazon again, do we?

Re:Ah, that's the true reason for one-click

[Sensae]

Except there were instructions up on Amazon about the deal explicitly stating the One-Click system would not work with this deal.

Re:Ah, that's the true reason for one-click

[Blakey Rat]

The deal was done as a coupon code. If you were one of the first thousand, you got a $200-off coupon code for that item. Once you had the code, you could come back at your leisure to set up the order for it.

Exactly like Madman's AU$10 DVDs for 10 Hours sale

[Devar]

Exactly the same thing happened to Madman's website when they had an online AU$10 DVDs for 10 Hours sale to celebrate their tenth anniversary. The website was completely inaccessible for those 10 hours, and led to a lot of irate anime fanboys. ;)

The Truth is...

[JimXugle]

A lot of the traffic came from Digg... the $100 XB360 story was on the front page twice. Once when it originally broke, and a reminder on thanksgiving.

Re:The Truth is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't kid yourself. digg (or slashdot, or any one site) was only a tiny, tiny fraction of the traffic. Everyone knew about this. Not only every deal site, but every person who has ever shopped online, as well as plenty who hadn't. Hell, it was on the local evening news the day before Thanksgiving as part of their "Holiday shopping kick off report".

Packaging

[camperdave]

It must be the excessive packaging that they use these days. All that cardboard has to come from somewhere. It might as well be Amazonian jungle foliage, since the rain forest is doomed from the pollution everyone will cause when they fire up their X-Boxes, Wiis, and PS3s (and the TVs they connect to).

Re:Exactly like Madman's AU$10 DVDs for 10 Hours s

[thedarknite]

It was up sporadically during those ten hours, and I was able to actually get through the checkout at hour nine. Of course, I'd pre-prepared my list of purchase because I knew that their servers would crash. Just like when Virgin Airlines offered a limited number of $1 flights in some promotion they had.

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:And I suspect Microsoft wasn't alone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome letter. I wish we had more people who can write calling the "mainstream' media on their apparent prostitution. Alas, I went to a public school. So thank you for being my unintentional proxy. If only there were more opportunities for those with the ability to make a career out of correcting the media's unquestioning compliance with the corporations.

Re:Cause And Effect ?

[dakara]

Entire forums of people How many Library of Congresses would it take to fit all those forums of people?

I think it did the job

[dalmiroy2k]

I don't even live in America, but a week ago I re-opened an US Amazon account just for this promo.
Even considering shipping and customs (no less than 100 dollars I think) It was a hell of a deal...
Oh, after that, I browsed around the site and bought "World War Z" and planning to buy "I am legend",

Re:Cause And Effect ?

[Nimey]

And how many ping-pong balls could fit in the fora?

100 behemoths

[njfuzzy]

Presumably, the weight of the controllers contributed most to the crushing.

Re:100 behemoths

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the original Xbox that had absurd controllers, until they redesigned them. This is the 360.
Although the 360 controllers are still pretty big, and since Sony and Nintendo now have extremely light controllers on their new systems they are still noticably heavier, but not exactly a strain to hold.

Re:100 behemoths

[JacksBrokenCode]

Don't forget, most of the people here still think BSOD jokes are relevant and funny.

official response from Amazon customer service

[DragonTHC]

Thank you for writing about this situation which you encoutered with
our web site.

First, please allow me to express my sincere apologies for any
frustration that has been caused. It is certainly not our intention
for our customers to have anything but a pleasant experience at our
store.

We are working hard to provide a stress-free and convenient holiday
shopping experience at Amazon.com. Unfortunately, we have not met
that standard in this case.

Please note many customers voted for customer vote program and were
waiting to place their orders at 11 A.M. This caused high network
traffic and hence our web site was slow.

We utilize top of the line servers, internal routers and network
connections. Although we often wish we could avert this problem,
many issues regarding speed are actually a result of complex
routing patterns over the Internet itself. Even the best Internet
services can't get around this fundamental problems.

To help prevent this problem in the future, you can reset your
cachesize. Go to the "Cache" or "Temporary Internet Files" option
on your web browser (in Internet Explorer, go to "Tools" and
choose "Internet Options"; if you use Netscape, go to "Options" and
choose "Network Preferences"), and make sure you have your memory
cache set to 3000 kilobytes, and your disk cache set to 5000
kilobytes.

For instructions on clearing your cache on other browsers and
platforms, please consult your browser's help documentation for
details on how to manage this process.

We here at Amazon customer service continuously strive to assist the
customers in each and every way can and feel disappointed when we
are unable to address customer's concerns. I hope you can understand
our limitations in this regard. as if the problem were the fault of my firefox cache

Anything but Sony

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, pro-Microsoft zealots on Slashdot continue to ignore the huge problems Microsoft is having with their poor quality and expensive online services.

Major problems still unresolved, customers demanding refunds and many are returning their machines outright.

Re:Not moving the merch

[Migraineman]

Looks like his two PS3s are still for sale, though at a substantial discount from the $1999 he was origianlly hoping for. I hope he enjoys playing with his two shiny PS3s, 'cause he's still horribly overpriced. The dude has completely missed the window of opportunity.

Amusingly, on the updated eBay page, he's removed the pics of his girlfriend, but retained the fish photo. Maybe he'll throw in some fresh fish filets:

Butthead eBay gouger : Hmmm, I'll make a quick buck by gouging some desperate fool
Butthead eBay gouger : please please PLEASE SOMEBODY BUY THESE DAMNED videogames!!! I don't want to get stuck with them. All my jock friends will make fun of me.

Re:Not moving the merch

[Impotent_Emperor]

Maybe if you buy his PS3 for $2000, his girlfriend will give you a "happy ending". And the fish must be for the fetish freaks.

What about a free PS3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody installed Linux on his PS3 and put it online.
He proposes to give it away to the first person who can hack it : Own this Playstation 3 and earn it!

BTW 19+ 6= 25

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in case...

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:Not moving the merch

[antic]

Happy ending? Didn't you notice her braces??

Dumb Servers

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Should have thought to use the HTTPS link to instead.
Although I managed to get to the verification page using the HTTP link, their dumbfvck servers didn't think that 8 + 6 = 14 :|

Amazon collapses...

[jward52]

I work the midnight shift and am never able to get on their site during those times. Does that happen to anyone else?

30 seconds at ground zero

[darkonc]

Think about it: at 35 transactions per second, it would take them all of 30 seconds to sell out of $100 X-Boxes -- and given that they had enough traffic to bring down the site, I'm sure that they were running X-Box transactions about as fast as the deadlock-resolution code could handle.

Now, why whould they do this?

If they got a couple million people on their site as a result of this insanity, they only need to get about $0.10 per customer to make up for what they lost on the promotion. Well worth the money.