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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."

5 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. The article is missing the Amazon link!!!! by Wolfier · · Score: 5, Funny

    here evil grin

  2. You want the blues? by AltGrendel · · Score: 5, Funny
    How about this? Talk about one stupid seller.

    . The guy will probably protest it though.

    --
    The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination

    - Douglas Adams

  3. Woot.com happens all the time. by tecker · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  4. '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.

  5. Re:No Chance by Crysalim · · Score: 5, Informative

    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