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Amazon Collapses Under Weight of 1,000 Xboxes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everyone-is-falling-down dept.

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."

3 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. 'beta test' ? by Quixote · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  2. Re:Typical by Bamafan77 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.
  3. Re:Heh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.