Slashdot Mirror
US Amazon.com Website Down For Over 1 Hour
CorporalKlinger writes "CNET News is reporting that Amazon's US website, Amazon.com, has been unreachable since 10:30 AM PDT today. As of posting, visiting www.amazon.com produces an 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable' message. According to CNET, "Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average." Some of Amazon's international websites still appear to be working, and some pages on the US Amazon.com site load if accessed using HTTPS instead of HTTP."
Because this represents 31k USD every minute.
It's really not all that difficult to survive a slashdot pounding for commercial web shops, even for dynamic content. Generally speaking, a popular link is going to generate perhaps 500k views a day for a day and some.
Only exceptions would be if there was a lot of heavy content being served on each page turn, saturation of one's uplink is a possibility - 10Gb links to the backbone aren't that common as yet, and CDNs like Akamai helps alleviate a good portion of that traffic.
My totally unsubstantiated guess is there was some DNS fooage that directed sites to a down cluster or possibly a screwed up CDN leg, but I'll be interested to see what's truly up.
sloth jr
"$31,000 per minute"
Even if accurate, that's assuming everyone who sees the error message will go somewhere else to buy their books.
I imagine some people would just wait to buy the book from amazon later when it is up again (probably very soon).
Exactly, except that not everyone that would have purchased their products in those 60 minutes will buy elsewhere. They hour they came back online they could make 1.9 x typical USD per minute. That and the fact that this is not really a holiday season of any sort, so sales are likely nowhere near the peak rates they reach around Christmas, New Years, etc...
That reasoning doesn't really work for me.
You'd have to factor in the ratio of income from the
US site v others (UK, etc.). IMHO, the US site is likely to be more profitable than others. You'd have to plow through an annual report to really know, and factor that in.
The larger flaw, though, is that you're subtracting one minute, when the title states > 1 hour. That implies going on A couple of million US$ in losses, which is significant, as investors don't know the reason, and caution would indicate that it could be recurring, such as the problems SalesForce has had. That hit their stock prices, etc.
The Amazon outage is more complex--TFA indicates that some of their services were unavailable for different amounts of time, etc. What are those service worth? All anyone has is a number--from CNET. Did they do anything like a real analysis, reading quarterly reports, etc? No, by long odds. Amazon does application hosting. What customers were affected, what percentage of the business is involved, and what do CxOs of large clients think?
The odds are actually quite good that many people give a crap. Investors (and CxOs) don't like uncertainty. It wouldn't surprise me to find some Wall Street analyst(s) making calls. Maybe it was an outage on a critical replication server, problem identified, fixed, and will provably never happen again. But maybe not. We'll see.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
Good to know you *used to* work there, 'cos I'm pretty sure you just violated your NDA.
Digg sends far more traffic to a site than Slashdot does (obviously it wasn't always this way). And digg's traffic isn't particularly noteworthy to a site of any reasonable size. (Say, Ars Technica, nevermind amazon.)
Yahoo Buzz, on the other hand, sends *huge* amounts of traffic, noticeable to sites like, again, Ars but again no disruptions of service*. But I doubt that amazon would even hiccup. If you think slashdot would even be a blip on amazon's radar, you have some serious delusions about 1) slashdot's size 2) amazon's size or 3) both.
* According to one of the devs.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
I know it's been running fine, I happen to use AWS.
But for business purposes, that fact isn't going to matter much to a PHB. What a PHB is going to remember is "Gee, didn't they have a serious outage a little while ago... better use something else!" Even if the best solution is, in fact, AWS + EC2.
Perception is more important than reality in business, unfortunately.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
Isn't the Loss number a bit misleading? Wouldn't the typical Amazon shopper see the site down, figure there has been a problem and return at a later time?
It's not like there are a lot of alternatives out there. Sure, some specialized places might fill part of the bill, but once you've become accustomed to Amazon, you more or less stick with em.
Slashdot has dual 10gig link's I'm sure Amazon's got multiple OC192's or a couple OC768's. Hmm, but on further research it looks like the may only have OC48's, at least for EC2.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.