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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."
here evil grin
. The guy will probably protest it though.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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?
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Obviously anyone would go for the thousand Xboxes for only $100. You could make $400,000 easy.
Now let's see of they can survive a slashdotting!
I will forever be a student.
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.
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"
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.
+5, Truth
Either that, or engineering couldn't figure out if they would rather complain about the promotion, or try to win the promotion!
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
They're using their grammar skills there.