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US Amazon.com Website Down For Over 1 Hour

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the there-goes-the-bottom-line dept.

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."

4 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. So, it finally happened... by geekgirlandrea · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Believe me, if you've seen the code that runs that site, it's impressive it runs as well as it does. Try to imagine 900M static binaries that take almost an hour to link because of some tiny little code change, because they can't be fucked to make their deployment system deal with dynamic libraries reasonably.

    1. Re:So, it finally happened... by geekgirlandrea · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Um, I used to work there. Believe it or not, there are some people here with real jobs and stuff.

    2. Re:So, it finally happened... by pclminion · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Believe me, if you've seen the code that runs that site, it's impressive it runs as well as it does. Try to imagine 900M static binaries that take almost an hour to link because of some tiny little code change, because they can't be fucked to make their deployment system deal with dynamic libraries reasonably.

      Fuck up a dynamic library and you fuck everything. Fuck up one of those 900M programs and you've fucked 1/900M'th of everything.

      What does Amazon's back end compile for? If it's Linux, that's an issue right there. The GNU linker has pathological behavior when linking large numbers of static libraries. I work on a relatively small (~1 million line) codebase and it takes about ten minutes to link. Link it on another platform (e.g. Solaris) and it links in about five seconds.

      The problem isn't the huge number of libraries. The problem is that the linker blows.

  2. Re:This will surely help by Goaway · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You think traffic from SlashDot would even be noticeable on Amazon's servers? You have some delusions of grandeur there.