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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."
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.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
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. :-/
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
here evil grin
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.
. The guy will probably protest it though.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
So was Amazon selling 1,000 XBOX systems at $100? Or selling a $1,000 XBOX system at $100?
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
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...)
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
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.
Here's the buyer asking if the contract is binding including an email from the seller.
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.
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....
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
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.
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.
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...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Now let's see of they can survive a slashdotting!
I will forever be a student.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
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.
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
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.
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
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??
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:
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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
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!
Hours? All 0.25 of them, you mean? I mean holy shit, it says 'About 15 minutes' right there in the blurb.
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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
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.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
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.