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."

Comments

Beer on the server?

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

I guess somebody spilled beer on the servers? I had no idea the guys from FARK also ran Amazon.

Re:Beer on the server?

[The Dobber]

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.

Re:Beer on the server?

[Anonymous Coward]

there were some mean lightning storms in southern-ontario, maybe some dns got screwed up, tends to happen and be fairly common (used to play a lot of video games)

Re:Beer on the server?

[Anonymous Coward]

First week of June, just about when the new CS grads show up and start trying to impress the old-timers with their hotshot server programming skills.

Coincidence?

Re:Beer on the server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope the Omicronians never find out about this.

Re:Beer on the server?

[Free the Cowards]

It's not like there are a lot of alternatives? Are you serious? Name one thing that Amazon sells which you cannot find in another online store in under thirty seconds.

"People are used to them" is not even remotely close to "there are few alternatives".

Re:Beer on the server?

[drinkypoo]

If you're talking about buying media, in my experience nothing comes even close to Amazon. For anything else, you can probably find it cheaper someplace else, and maybe easier too.

Re:Beer on the server?

[maceilean]

Media? Movies and music are cheaper on p2p and easier to buy on itunes. Mass market paperbacks are cheapest and easiest to buy on Amazon. The best source for all other books is aggregate search sites like addall.com or bookfinder.com Amazon has never had a stranglehold on book sales even if they are the biggest player in town. Even if ebooks become as prevalent as mp3s there will always be a market for independent specialized booksellers. Disclosure: I am a bookseller. I sell on Amazon and a few other book search services linked to addall, etc. like biblio.com and abebooks.com

Re:Beer on the server?

[Kreigaffe]

There's plenty of music and movies you can't get off p2p.

Shocking, I know, clearly I'm lying.. wait, no, I'm not.

Some of us have money and like actually buying shit that's worth buying instead of downloading shit that's not. and oh, ew, itunes, ew, ew ew. itunes turns you gay, man. happened to my cousin, honest truth. one minute, virile heterosexual young male, downloads ONE THING off itunes, BAM! Dick in his mouth. Next time I saw him he had the apple logo tattooed on his nuts and a one-button mouse up his ass. Wasn't pretty.

Re:Beer on the server?

[msromike]

Maybe he doesn't like stating the obvious? Like, "There are almost no alternatives that offer the same price, fast and inexpensive delivery, quality, and level of customer service." Or are you just arguing for the sake of argument?

Re:Beer on the server?

[Free the Cowards]

So you're saying that he's stating something that's obviously untrue, and using this as a way to actually say something completely different?

I don't buy it. He said there's no alternative. There are a zillion alternatives. I'm arguing because he's wrong.

Re:Beer on the server?

[drinkypoo]

Media? Movies and music are cheaper on p2p and easier to buy on itunes. Mass market paperbacks are cheapest and easiest to buy on Amazon. The best source for all other books is aggregate search sites

I am unwilling to go to a search site and scan through reviews of sites in order to figure out who is a legitimate seller and who will fuck me around. I do this for computer parts on pricewatch sometimes but just as often I'll directly go to a trusted retailer that I know will just ship my shit and not screw me around on a return.

Re:Beer on the server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Following that logic, there should be some sort of noticable spike in sales following the return of service. Take the difference between the average and the spike, then compare that result to the average for the period of the outage. Any negative delta is a loss in sales.

Keep in mind that Amazon and other online retailers rely on impulse buys as well as intentional buys, so they will most likely lose those sales permanently.

holy shit

[Anonymous Coward]

holy shit

Re:holy shit

[Doddman]

AAAAANNNDDD why is this ncsry cmt

But...

[Shikaku]

It works just fine for me right now.

Also now you are Slashdotting it!

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

If amazon can be slashdotted then she is not the brawd I thought she was.

This will surely help

[moderatorrater]

I'm sure the sysadmins appreciate Slashdot sending thousands of requests their way while they're site's already down. While we're at it, maybe we should find someone with a papercut and start squirting lemon juice all over them.

Re:This will surely help

[sloth jr]

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

Re:This will surely help

[general scruff]

OffTopic Alert!!!

I honestly can't believe how many people have not see "Princess Bride". The world would be a better place if more had seen it... Or something...

Re:This will surely help

[Goaway]

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

Re:This will surely help

[DrHanser]

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.

Re:This will surely help

[Anonymous Coward]

And just to piss off a Taco

Alexa ranking comparing slashdot.org and amazon.com (thats not including all the other amazon tlds!)

Re:This will surely help

[afidel]

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.

Re:This will surely help

[SavvyPlayer]

And for good measure ...

Re:This will surely help

[BlueCollarCamel]

That's a bit misleading... how many slashdotters use both IE and the Alexa add-on?

Re:This will surely help

[sideswipe76]

Actually, we had to ADD hosts to our vips just to accomodate the slashdotting!

Re:This will surely help

[sideswipe76]

Actually, we did notice. Particularly, performance.amazon.com needed to have hundreds of host added to account for the added slashdot traffic

Re:This will surely help

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot still sends far more aggregate traffic to a site than digg. Think about it: How long are you on the Slashdot homepage, versus Digg? I've seen logs of both and Digg will generate a huge spike (more bandwith when it hits the front page than with Slashdot, indeed) but after an hour it's gone. Slashdot traffic lasts all day.

Re:This will surely help

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's take a look at what Alexa has to say, shall we?

Traffic Rank for Amazon.com: 26
Traffic Rank for Slashdot.org: 3697

You were saying?

Re:This will surely help

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a firefox addon too. I have it installed on one of my machines.

Great!

[felipekk]

Slashdotting a webserver that is having technical difficulties surely sounds like a great idea!

Re:Great!

[pclminion]

If you think the traffic Slashdot is capable of directing to a site is even within the same order of magnitude as what Amazon deals with every day (especially when they're down and people are compulsively reloading), you're insane.

Patents

[QuantumRiff]

Wait until a patent comes out for: "Taking a web presense offline, to generate discussion about the web presense, thereby increasing awareness about the site." Also, sucks to be the guy that stepped on the surge protector laying on the floor....

Re:Patents

[Samus]

The Twitter guys will have prior art.

Re:Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if it hadn't been for this outage, I might never have known about this Amazon site. And to think I could have been buying stuff ONLINE all these years!

Re:Patents

[tepples]

The Twitter guys will have prior art. Who? Erris and Gnutoo?

So, it finally happened...

[geekgirlandrea]

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.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

how would you know about?

Re:So, it finally happened...

[geekgirlandrea]

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

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

Boooooooooommmmmmmmmm

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay mythical female Slashdot reader, with your unicorn and leprechauns friends chasing chupacabres out of the Amazon codebase. We believe you.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[geekgirlandrea]

Yeah, it wasn't like that at all. There used to be a few chupacabras, but I think the shoggoths ate them all, and those leprechauns never did any work. They'd just wander around all day, picking people's pockets and teleporting away.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[AuMatar]

Well, if you worked there in the last 2 years you'd know that the giant monolithic app is dead and not mourned. I drew the short straw and had to sit in all day on the con call when they were taking it down area by area.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[pclminion]

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.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[p0tat03]

Good to know you *used to* work there, 'cos I'm pretty sure you just violated your NDA.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Rycross]

So its a lot better working environment there now, then?

Re:So, it finally happened...

[SatanicPuppy]

I've never seen an NDA that would restrict someone from saying, "It was a bunch of big programs that took a long time to load."

Seriously. She didn't even say what language or what platform they're running on, which is more useful and easy for even a non-employee to figure out.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

GP meant a single ~1GB binary, not 900 million binaries. See Obidos
GP is approximately 3 years out of date. See Gurupa

Since I can't give any details directly, I'll let wiki do it.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, this is the 90's calling, we'd like Amazon's old architecture back.

Really. What you describe hasn't been in use for years. It's a much more robust, albeit distributed, architecture. You obviously don't know what you are talking about.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[B3ryllium]

Wouldn't you agree that link time is largely irrelevant (except in the situation of having to fix a critical bug that should have been discovered in testing anyway)?

Being able to avoid the incessant act of compiling/linking is probably what leads to so much sub-par PHP code in the first place - you're less likely to be moulded into a mindset of getting it right the first time :)

Re:So, it finally happened...

[GryMor]

I like it. But I'm crazy, YMMV.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Otter]

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.

I think her point was that there's one gigantic binary, not an enormous number of tiny ones.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[TooMuchToDo]

Touché Slashdot girl, Touché. And, may I add as someone who reads Slashdot with a "real" job, I'm impressed/appreciative not only of the code that drive's Amazon.com (their COAL stack has many benefits vs. LAMP), but also of their infrastructure that drives S3 and EC2. Thanks Amazon devs!

Re:So, it finally happened...

[pclminion]

I think her point was that there's one gigantic binary, not an enormous number of tiny ones.

Okay. The sentence, I hope you can admit, was awfully ambiguous. Anyway, the second two paragraphs of my reply still stand. GNU ld seems to exhibit O(N^2) behavior as the number of static libs increases. At one time I went Googling for a technical description of why this was the case. I didn't find any clear answer, but I did find a couple of posts by ld devs basically saying "It isn't going to be fixed." I think because it's too hard. The whole linker needs a rewrite, IMHO.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Joe U]

It's a much more robust, albeit distributed, architecture Well, obviously not as robust as you're making it out to be.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

that COAL is rapidly burning to make room for Java ;-)

Re:So, it finally happened...

[bark]

The post on the google blog had a reply from the person who did Gold (see the link to Gold a few posts back) had this to say:

Ian Lance Taylor said...

ralph: The main difference in gold is that it was designed from the ground up to work for ELF. The GNU linker was designed to work for a.out and COFF.

ELF conceptually requires three passes over the object files, a.out and COFF require two. A version of the third pass was hacked into the GNU linker by using a backpatch system on the symbol table, in which the GNU linker makes some decisions when it first reads the object file, and then undoes those decisions when appropriate after seeing all the objects. The backpatching causes the GNU linker to traverse the symbol table multiple times; this is very expensive in a large link. Reducing the number of symbol table traversals is probably the most significant change.

A couple of smaller but significant changes can be found on my blog:

Multi-threading.

C++ templates avoid byte swapping.

April 7, 2008 9:03 AM

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, you worked as a secretary at amazon. What would you know about it?

Re:So, it finally happened...

[pHatidic]

"They'd just wander around all day, picking people's pockets and teleporting away."

Like nethack.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[sideswipe76]

OMA! OMA! Ah yes, a C++ app so large that is takes 3 hours to link and occupies 4gb in memory!

Re:So, it finally happened...

[sideswipe76]

No, it's true. I can confirm

Re:So, it finally happened...

[sideswipe76]

Shut your hole. Until you have worked there you just can't even comprehend

Re:So, it finally happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like you, very much.

Re:So, it finally happened...

[pclminion]

I can't even comprehend the stupidity of 900M binaries? Or I can't comprehend the stupidity of a single ~1 gig binary? I'm pretty sure I comprehend both stupidities just fine.

How is this news?

[McFly69]

How is this news? Websites go down, for various reasons, all the time. How is this story /. worthy?

Re:How is this news?

[felipekk]

Because this represents 31k USD every minute.

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashvertizement at work.

Re:How is this news?

[Last_Available_Usern]

The irony is you in fact have confirmed the worthiness of this article by making the obligatory "Why is this news?" post.

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because this represents 31k USD every minute. That assumes that everyone who would have bought something doesn't just try again when the site's back up. Nevermind that the number quoted is talking about a global outage -- this is just a partial outage.

Re:How is this news?

[mixmatch]

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...

Re:How is this news?

[Dachannien]

Slashvertizement at work. You know, because nobody's ever heard of Amazon.com before.

Re:How is this news?

[yorugua]

Because a communication disruption could only mean one thing: invasion.

Re:How is this news?

[Anubis IV]

Well, they lost my business.

I was all set to make quite a few purchases on Amazon, my first ones in several years, only to have this happen in the middle of my shopping. I ended up finding some of the same products over at eBay and then later I found the remaining ones at a store in the mall. Now, Amazon gets nothing from me.

There are other venues that sell the same items, so I seriously doubt they're going to get 1.9x sales. The fact that brand loyalty is extremely low on the internet doesn't help any; people won't miss a beat in jumping ship and finding another store that offers the same item. People do internet shopping for the convenience, and if the store is down, it's inconvenient to wait.

Re:How is this news?

[TooMuchToDo]

I just waited for them to come back before I bought the stuff I wanted (around $200). I would rather wait on Amazon than give my money to Ebay and Paypal (via sellers on Ebay).

Re:How is this news?

[eh2o]

Actually its probably more like 15-20k USD per minute. Presumably, like most retailers, they make a lot more money in November-December than the rest of the year.

Re:How is this news?

[Z34107]

Yes, but there are only so many hours in a day. Purchases are made 24/7 - surely not everyone abandoned their purchasing plans, but there were several hours where they could have been making money, but weren't.

They're $31,000/hr * hours poorer this year. It's a massive stiffing you of your hours this week, but you might get a few more next week (or next year).

Not to mention the extra money it must cause to repair equipment/buy new equipment/pay people to do said things/etc.

Re:How is this news?

[triffidsting]

No, but Father's Day is just around the corner.

pre slashdotting

[DoctorDeath]

Now then when they do come back on line, thet will get slashdotted by everyone trying to see what's going on.

D&D did it.

[Silicon Jedi]

One of the top sellers on Amazon is the D&D 4th Edition Core Rules giftset. It apparently is only shipping to some pre-orders. The geeks are freaking out and untintentionally DoS'ing Amazon.

Re:D&D did it.

[moderatorrater]

I find that highly unlikely. Less than 10% of the population is even interested in D&D. Factor in the usual resistance to new editions and the number of different places you can preorder the books, DnD taking down Amazon is like a wererat taking out a team of 9th level adventurers.

Re:D&D did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Joke

..whoosh...

You

Re:D&D did it.

[3dr]

Somebody cast magic missile.

Re:D&D did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Score: -1, Failure to see blatantly obvious sarcasm.

Re:D&D did it.

[OrangeTide]

I sure am glad you didn't take his statement seriously. Would have been pretty silly to argue a point against that.

Re:D&D did it.

[Abreu]

For Gygax's sake, I was promised it would ship today!!!

I want my D&D! ...and if you see the Amazon page for the core rulebook set, you'll see its sold out and backordered already!

Re:D&D did it.

[JustinKSU]

I think it is more likely the fact that the (new 80GB Playstation 3 / Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle) went on pre-sale today. Unlike the 40GB variant, it is backwards compatible with Playstation 2 games. The Pre-ordering went live 30 minutes before the crash.

Re:D&D did it.

[alone in SF]

How about a lightning bolt instead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ04mfAY2BU

Re:D&D did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

DnD taking down Amazon is like a wererat taking out a team of 9th level adventurers. I don't know, man... Peter Pettigrew was able to take out James and Lily Potter (though indirectly), and they were at least 9th-level equivalent... Well, on second thought, I'd estimate James was about 10th level and Lily was 8th level.

Re:D&D did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Less than 10% of the population is even interested in D&D.

You mean less than one tenth of one percent. Or was that another whoosh?

Re:D&D did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

"God is dead" - Nietzsche, 1882

"Nietzsche is dead" - God, 1900

This "bumper sticker" is just plain dumb

Re:D&D did it.

[felipekk]

Yeah, but if only one of them get a critical strike....

Re:D&D did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes this god fellow sound a little insecure and bloodthirsty.

Re:D&D did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. They even wrote a book or two about him.

Analogy

[felipekk]

Posting on /. about a website with difficulties is like throwing a bucket of water on someone drowning. Actually, considering how big /. is, this is more like using a fire hose on someone drowning.

Re:Analogy

[rhombic]

Considering how big Amazon is, it's more like using a fire hose on an aircraft carrier, I think.

Re:Analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Better comparison, but couldn't you work a car into it somehow?

Re:Analogy

[jonno317]

But a sinking aircraft carrier! ...or maybe one with a bit of water on the deck.

Re:Analogy

[UncleTogie]

Better comparison, but couldn't you work a car into it somehow?

Sure! How 'bout:

It's like trying to break a car window by shooting spitballs at it....

Re:Analogy

[Bryansix]

So now the aircraft carrier is slippery?

Re:Analogy

[general scruff]

Where is BadAnalogyGuy when you need him!!!!

Re:Analogy

[ColdWetDog]

Where is BadAnalogyGuy when you need him!!!!

Out in the back, working on his car.

Re:Analogy

[CarAnalogy]

No, that's me you're referring to.

Re:Analogy

[Swampash]

Posting on /. about a website with difficulties is like throwing a bucket of water on someone drowning. Actually, considering how big /. is, this is more like using a fire hose on someone drowning.

Given that it's Amazon we're talking about, it's more like throwing a bucket of water on a submarine. While it's submerged.

Hmm...

[Shinra]

I bet they briefly had Wiis in stock and the servers got overloaded with rapid-fire orders. Or perhaps a mouse ate through a wire in the server room. anything is possible.

We're sorry...

[Mi1ez]

Looks like they JUST put up a 'We're sorry' page within the past few minutes. I had happened to be on Amazon AS it went down.. it was working one moment then suddenly died while I was browsing their MP3's for download.

Re:We're sorry...

[felipekk]

Hmmmm... sounds like they are being DoS'ed by MediaDefender.

Re:We're sorry...

[Mi1ez]

Well, they ARE making MP3's available for download. :) Now it looks like they've gone back to an "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error.

Re:We're sorry...

[Mi1ez]

YAY!! And now it's back!!

OH NOES

[snarfies]

Wow, their website was down for one whole friggin' hour. They may (or may not) have lost $31,000/minute, IF the outage was global, not that it was - it was just the US site. Assuming it was global, and assuming they lost the max $31,000, that would be $31,000 out of $16,293,600,000.

In short, who give a crap. Post a story when they're down for at least 24 hours.

Re:OH NOES

[Jason Levine]

Not to nitpick or anything, but at $31,000 per minute, an hour outage would cost $1,860,000, not $31,000.

Re:OH NOES

[navygeek]

Hush, the troll ran out of fingers and toes.

There, there little troll. Please continue your nonsensical rant.

Re:OH NOES

[VENONA]

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.

Re:OH NOES

[Firehed]

Assuming that every one of those purchased was lost either to another seller or to some sort of desire-destroying void. I very much doubt either was the case for the vast majority of the "lost" sales.

Re:OH NOES

[Sparr0]

You completely overlooked the revenue vs profit mistake in the summary. If they are losing $31000 in revenue every minute, they are also not-losing 0$N31000 worth of merchandise. Assuming a phenomenal 50% profit margin, they would only actually be losing-money losing $15500 per minute.

Re:OH NOES

[drinkypoo]

...and as soon as I wash the handles of my pliers, I'll start working on the really interesting bits.

(partially) works for me...

[nathana]

I was just about to post saying that I had no problems getting to the site. I hit Amazon's home page, and it came up just fine for me...the first time. I was about to hit submit until I decided to also try navigating around the site a bit, log into my account, etc.; so I went back to try, and ran into the problem.

So, it seems to be working...at times.

D&D

[The Aethereal]

4th edition D&D books came out today. Coincidence?

Re:D&D

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just that, but the site came down moments after the MGS4 bundle sold out (sold out in seven minutes).

http://www.ps3fanboy.com/2008/06/06/metal-gear-bundle-kills-amazon-com/

Granted, with a name like PS3Fanboy you'll have to take this with a huge grain of salt, but the timing matches up nonetheless.

Re:D&D

[hchaudh1]

I don't think the name PS3Fanboy matters much. All these sites like WiiFanboy and XBox360Fanboy are run by the same parent group.

Re:D&D

[east coast]

I didn't know servers would crash due to a lack of interest.

Seriously, look at the DnD 4.0 thread... I don't think I've seen something go over so lackluster since the Segway came out.

HTTPS works

[Anonymous Coward]

just change the URL from HTTP to HTTPS and it works

so only port 80 servers are down

Re:HTTPS works

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all and well for just getting to the website but all the links are in http. How many people are going to go click the link, change http to https, hit the website and repeat?

P.S. It is already mentioned in the summary.

Re:HTTPS works

[pimpimpim]

yeah, swell, let's have amazon's servers encrypt all traffic, that'll reduce their server load.

Re:HTTPS works

[pyite]

yeah, swell, let's have amazon's servers encrypt all traffic, that'll reduce their server load.

Most likely they're using something like a NetScaler to do load balancing. In the case of NetScaler, they have built in hardware to do the public key encryption portion of SSL (which is the expensive part). Symmetric encryption, be it Triple-DES or AES is very easy to do in CPU.

Re:HTTPS works

[drinkypoo]

Most likely they're using something like a NetScaler to do load balancing.

who knows? there's no reason they can't just use round-robin DNS, which works fine on volumes as large as amazon's. But then, who knows? It could be a farm of caseless x86 PCs running Linux on baker's racks :P

Symmetric encryption, be it Triple-DES or AES is very easy to do in CPU.

Times how many users?

wtf -- is boingboing moderating slashdot now too?

[Anonymous Coward]

AAAAANNNDDD why is this ncsry cmt

wht th fck?

How much lost?

[robo_mojo]

"$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).

Re:How much lost?

[timeOday]

True, but it's also hard to measure other intangibles such as tarnished image.

And Amazon, in my mind, doesn't quite have the nice comfy natural monopoly of network effects (think ebay, youtube or even slashdot). Nothing amazon sells cannot be bought elsewhere at about the same price. (That said, I'm a long-term and satisfied Amazon customer who tends to buy there unless I can save several bucks buying elsewhere).

Re:How much lost?

[ibmjones]

Even if accurate, that's assuming everyone who sees the error message will go somewhere else to buy their books.

Dude, books are not the only thing that Amazon sells now.

What year are you posting from? 1999?

Somebody write a book about this please

[davidwr]

I hope it's better than The Cuckoos Egg but I wouldn't know, I couldn't place my order for Stoll's book.

Re:Somebody write a book about this please

[swordgeek]

Hey, Cliff's back in print!

That is one genuinely oddball character. Interesting, nuts, and totally caught by random events around him. It's a good book.

do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

Microsoft and Apple got it too.  Probably many others.

$ whois amazon.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

AMAZON.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
AMAZON.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
AMAZON.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM
AMAZON.COM

$ whois microsoft.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

MICROSOFT.COM.ZZZZZZ.MORE.DETAILS.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.ZZZOMBIED.AND.HACKED.BY.WWW.WEB-HACK.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.ZZZ.IS.0WNED.AND.HAX0RED.BY.SUB7.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.LIVE.FOREVER.BECOUSE.UNIXSUCKS.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.BE.SLAPPED.IN.THE.FACE.BY.MY.BLUE.VEINED.SPANNER.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.BE.BEATEN.WITH.MY.SPANNER.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.WAREZ.AT.TOPLIST.GULLI.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.USERS.SHOULD.HOST.WITH.UNIX.AT.ITSHOSTED.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.TOTALLY.SUCKS.S3U.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.SOFTWARE.IS.NOT.USED.AT.REG.RU
MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.RAWKZ.MUH.WERLD.MENTALFLOSS.CA
MICROSOFT.COM.OHMYGODITBURNS.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.LOVES.ME.KOSMAL.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.LIVES.AT.SHAUNEWING.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.NOT.YEPPA.ORG
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.IN.BED.WITH.CURTYV.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.HOSTED.ON.PROFITHOSTING.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.GOD.BECOUSE.UNIXSUCKS.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.A.STEAMING.HEAP.OF.FUCKING-BULLSHIT.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.A.MESS.TIMPORTER.CO.UK
MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.ITS.OWN.CRACKLAB.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.A.PRESENT.COMING.FROM.HUGHESMISSILES.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.FILLS.ME.WITH.BELLIGERENCE.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.CAN.GO.FUCK.ITSELF.AT.SECZY.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.ARE.GODDAMN.PIGFUCKERS.NET.NS-NOT-IN-SERVICE.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.AND.MINDSUCK.BOTH.SUCK.HUGE.ONES.AT.EXEGETE.NET
MICROSOFT.COM

$ whois apple.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

APPLE.COM.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.IS.OWN3D.BY.NAKEDJER.COM
APPLE.COM.IS.0WN3D.BY.GULLI.COM
APPLE.COM.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM

DNS Issue

[prestonmichaelh]

I had noticed the outage and think it may be a DNS issue. I guess I won't be buying anything today. Take a look at the whois output for amazon.com:

# whois amazon.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.

Server Name: AMAZON.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
IP Address: 69.41.185.219
Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com/

Server Name: AMAZON.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
IP Address: 203.36.226.2
Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net/

Server Name: AMAZON.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM
IP Address: 80.190.192.24
Registrar: EPAG DOMAINSERVICES GMBH
Whois Server: whois.enterprice.net
Referral URL: http://www.enterprice.net/

Domain Name: AMAZON.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com/
Name Server: UDNS1.ULTRADNS.NET
Name Server: UDNS2.ULTRADNS.NET
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 28-mar-2008
Creation Date: 01-nov-1994
Expiration Date: 31-oct-2017

>>> Last update of whois database: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:26:07 EDT

Re:DNS Issue

[geekgirlandrea]

So, because some loser can set up a few records in a completely different domain, this is supposed to somehow have some effect on Amazon's DNS?

Re:DNS Issue

[Bryansix]

No, the real shocker is that they use Network Solutions which is a company that perpetually has it's thumbs stuck up their asses.

Re:DNS Issue

[geekgirlandrea]

With Amazon, this isn't really shocking at all. I'm soooo glad I don't work there any more.

Re:DNS Issue

[Rycross]

Any reason why? I had an interview with them so I'm curious.

Re:DNS Issue

[geekgirlandrea]

It's a giant cube farm, and their code is like some sort of crawling horror of reanimated spaghetti which long ago swallowed up and devoured all documentation. And then there's the deployment system. As I mentioned in another comment on this article, it can't deal with dynamic libraries. When I left, it was a real and immediate issue how we were going to keep a certain product's dependencies small enough that it would be able to *link* in a 32-bit virtual address space. The linker was up to something like 2.8 GB of working set.

Re:DNS Issue

[Rycross]

Sounds kinda like my current job. Maybe I'll just pass if they decide to give me a second interview... Thanks for the info.

Re:DNS Issue

[DanielT_xOOx]

whois information has nothing to do with DNS. You should use whois amazon.com -h whois.networksolutions.com to get proper info. What you saw is a result of wildcard search in wrong whois server.

The DNS servers for a domain name are announced in root DNS servers - and there, everything is fine. For example, dig NS amazon.com @a.gtld-servers.net return correct DNS servers: udns1.ultradns.net. and udns2.

However, dnsreport show lots of errors with nameservers:
http://private.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnsreportsmpl.ch?domain=amazon.com

Re:DNS Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. Ugly bitch has an axe to grind. It is not nor ever was that bad and is already significantly better. Did you leave because your boss turned down your disgusting sexual advances?

Re:DNS Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

grandparent's info is years out of date.

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[felipekk]

Looks like you are the one who got pwn3d.

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[Em Adespoton]

That whois lookup says absolutely nothing... I could add amazon.com.myserver.net as a dns record too, and it would have nothing to do with the lookups for amazon.com. The trick is to use whois to see what IP address www.amazon.com currently points at.

However, as has been pointed out, HTTPS works, so it's defininitely not a DNS issue. More likely someone along the chain corrupted a pooling link to the main http server and it propogated. I've done the same thing on apache2 servers in the past and had the same result; https still works fine, but http returns an error on key pages.

They Think I'm a Robot

[Bryansix]

When I try I get to a page that says they think I'm a robot and I don't have access to see their website.

Well I think THEY are the robot. I don't know if I can win this argument...

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[Dogtanian]

You: Well I think THEY are the robot. I don't know if I can win this argument...
Elizamazon: Do you wish that you can win this argument?

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting a "We're Sorry" page too. Was really worried that it was something on my end till I saw this. Wonder if I should email them or just wait it out.

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[BookRead]

Danger! Will Robinson! Danger!

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[urcreepyneighbor]

We're sorry!

You have been denied access to this feature because we believe you violated the terms, conditions, rules, guidelines or policies of our site in the past. If you believe we have taken this action in error, you may contact us at ad-help-us@amazon.com.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why am I seeing this page?
A: This page is usually shown when we believe that the request is coming from a robot or other automated source of requests. If you are not a robot please contact us immediately by emailing ad-help-us@amazon.com and we will reinstate your access to our website.

Q: How can I operate a robot and not get this page?
A: We understand that there are many legitimate reasons for robots to access our website. We are happy to work with people trying to create robots so that they may do so safely and efficiently. If you are operating a robot and you are seeing this page we'd love to hear from you so that we may better understand your use case and help you to achieve your goals. Please email ad-help-us@amazon.com and we'll help you out - seriously, we aren't mad at you.

Q: What are some general tips for people writing robots?
A: First, you should see if there is a better method to get the information you need. For example, Amazon Web Services provides a rich set of APIs to retrieve the information displayed on many of Amazon's web pages (prices, reviews, sales rank, etc). Because Amazon Web Services exposes a stable set of APIs that provide structured data it is often much easier to retrieve information via this method. You'll be able to find out more about Amazon Web Services at http://aws.amazon.com./ Second, you should identify your robot using a unique user agent string that provdes a way we can get in touch with you if necessary. For example, here is Google's user agent string Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html). Using Safari (not logged into an Amazon acct), I get that message. Using Opera (logged in with an acct that has been used for years), I get:

We're sorry!
An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we're already working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly.

If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed.

We apologize for the inconvenience. They havin' problems. ;)

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you just failed the Turing Test. Please report immediately for processing.

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[Kelson]

How do you feel about the fact that that you think they are the robot?

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't even pass a Turing test?

Pathetic.

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[jackl420]

I was getting that message most of yesterday afternoon. I sent a "fix it, I'm not a robot" email to the mailto: address on the error screen and regained access to the site about an hour later. It didn't make any difference which browser I used, which led me to suspect my DNS or pre-set cookie was behind the block.

They also had a dopey picture of a Irish setter on the "we're sorry" page, apparently so you wouldn't hate them so much for the blocking message.

Re:They Think I'm a Robot

[Chapter80]

Classic reference! Should have been "Score:5 Funny".

Unfortunately, I guess most moderators weren't around in 1966. But I laughed out loud. (sorry.. LOL'd)

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[quazee]

Of course, it's not a hack.

A fully-qualified DNS domain name ends with a dot, so you should type 'whois amazon.com.' instead.
Those "hacked" results you are getting are just bogus amazon.com.foo.bar. subdomains.

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[Mage Powers]

Oddly enough this came up the last time something amazon went down.

if I specify microsoft.com.looksatporn.com as a nameserver for a domain I have, it doesn't mean I'm hacking microsoft.com ;)

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[nahdude812]

Whatever this DNS thing is you're pointing out, it's not the first time it's happened, I am finding stuff from May 4, January, and even June 27 of last year with some of the same strings.

The problem isn't Amazon . . .

[UnknowingFool]

It's all you people not typing in the write web address. Try it again. Make sure you put in the umlaut correctly. What do you mean there's no umlaut in Amazon.com? *Unplugs toaster and plugs back in Amazon's server* Wait 5 minutes and try again. --BOFH

$31,000 per minute!

[DirePickle]

would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average.

Because obviously if someone tries to buy something and Amazon is broken for an hour, they're just going to not-buy it or buy it from a competitor. Because you definitely can't wait an extra hour to place an order when it'll take 2-10 days for the product to get shipped to you anyway.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[screamphilling]

actually I was about to spend $40 on a hiking tent when I discovered the site down. I hadn't seen the Slashdot story about this. Being the impatient person that I am, I went over to Google products and found a dealer with good ratings to purchase from... I'm not a frequent Amazon shopper or anything.. maybe once a month or two

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[Omnifarious]

Because obviously if someone tries to buy something and Amazon is broken for an hour, they're just going to not-buy it or buy it from a competitor. Because you definitely can't wait an extra hour to place an order when it'll take 2-10 days for the product to get shipped to you anyway.

Well, they will frequently come back, yes. But the site being down also affects consumer confidence in a big way and that will make fewer people likely to go to the site.

So, using the metric of exactly how much you sell in a given time period is likely inaccurate, but I suspect the actual impact is higher, not lower.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny I thought the same thing.... But I hit the site during an outage to buy a new mouse... When I saw it was down, I thought I would try again later, but eventually I just got up from my desk and walked over to target and bought one there. So yes, I did buy from a competitor because the site was down.

Turns out I wanted the mouse now anyways, instead of waiting for it to ship, but I was initially too lazy to walk the 2 blocks to the store. Amazon being down was the little push of motivation I needed to get off my butt and buy it.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[ColdWetDog]

actually I was about to spend $40 on a hiking tent when I discovered the site down.

If you're buying a $40 tent, I hope that all you are planning on doing is camping in the basement. At least pray that it doesn't rain.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're buying a $40 tent, I hope that all you are planning on doing is camping in the basement.

Hmm.. yup...
You sound like one of those folks with their $300 Brookstone super tents, pocket "survival" knife, $500 worth of shoes, carabiners, canteens, and other survival gear that has trekked out to the local campground and now thinks they can talk about others in their $40 tents.

$40 tents are luxuries.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree totally with the exception being its important what exactly your sell.

I've worked at places that have gone down from the time period of hours up to days and trust me the graph of sales the next day didn't double. You without a doubt loose money.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[screamphilling]

I am bicycling across Iceland. I think a 40 dollar tent might be insufficient for the wind and rain, but I guess I will have to find out the hard way. I'm doing it on a $250 mountain bike. I don't think nice equipment is a requirement, but investing in higher quality gear certainly helps sometimes, though i could probably construct something with a tarp, stakes, and string if I really needed to.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[bughunter]

Subby got it backwards. That's how much the outage is saving me in impulsive purchases.

Opus:HSN::bughunter:Amazon.com

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[Carnildo]

If you don't care about the weight, $40 will get you a pretty good tent -- that weighs fifteen pounds.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[Otter]

But the site being down also affects consumer confidence in a big way and that will make fewer people likely to go to the site.

C'mon, how many people are really going to stop buying from Amazon because their website was down for a few hours on June 6, 2008?

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if this actually happened frequently. It does not (yes, I do have some idea on this -- it is well-known in-house when such high severity events occur -- funny it should occur right during quarterly all-hands meeting today).

So the figure is fictional: however, it does serve a purposes -- after all, measuring real impact is nigh impossible, so it's good to have some illustrative number to explain new employees why it's important to try to keep site up and running :)

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[falken0905]

Hmmm, a recent study by a leading university indicates that Slashdot readers have an 80% higher incidence of ADHD and OC than the general population. So yeah, damn right I'd buy it somewhere else or... um, er, wow, let's go ride the bikes.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[fermion]

It is things like this that make people investigate other options. Perhaps due to this down time, and not knowing if Amazon will be back up in the near future, customers go and find another, equally good source. At this point amazon has not only lost the hour of sales, but all future sales that person might have transacted. It is customer service.

For instance I was a customer when Amazon first came online. It was pretty crappy service, so after a while I left, and did not return for a few years. I now order a lot of stuff, but over the past several months the quality of shipping, particularly books, has dropped. Most books are not packed properly and come damaged. I don't waste my complaining, I just change my ordering habits. Since the books are going to come in used condition anyway, I just order used books, often elsewhere, and save a bundle. In this US economy where even Walmart is caving to pressure groups to keep customers, this is hardly the time for Amazon to let service slip.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[mgblst]

How do you know that it is going to be an extra hour?

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[ccguy]

you definitely can't wait an extra hour to place an order

Sure you can wait an hour, but how do you know it's going to be an hour?

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

Think again.

Do you think most people will even notice if the site's down for an hour? Of course not, and as long as their orders are actually going through without problems, those who don't see the downtime for themselves will not care about it.

But there's something else - namely, the reason amazon is so successful, and that's the combination of a) low prices and b) decent service.

Take me, for example. I just ordered a blender from them; I bought it on Friday last week, got it delivered Monday morning, and the price in the local brick-and-mortar stores would've been 25% higher (I went and checked).

I also checked whether I could get it even cheaper online - and yeah, it would've been possible to save another 3 bucks (5%), but all the sellers that would've been cheaper also had rather mediocre customer ratings at best, and the potential trouble wasn't worth it to me.

Amazon really is both cheap and reliable, and that's why people order from them - and it's also why people will keep on ordering even if they get a "site unavailable" for one hour, for the first time ever in the 10+ years the site's been in existence. Customers may be fickle, but they're not stupid.

Re:$31,000 per minute!

[DirePickle]

I think it'd be pretty clear that Amazon.com isn't a fly-by-night operation and that even if it were something wrong with the website and not a router somewhere else, it'd probably be back the same day, even if not exactly an hour later. When I buy things online, if there's something wrong with my preferred vendor, I'll just check back later in the day.

Its less than 31k, but still not cheap

[Tmack]

Per SEC filings, this qtr last year they did $2.8B in sales. Given that sales increased ~$800K first qtr this year over last, a similar increase for this qtr would put them at ~$3.4B, or ~$30K/min, or $483/sec. Going off the quarterly report instead of annual eliminates the obvious holiday season bias, which would inflate the numbers for this part of the year, but still doesnt take into account the daily/hourly distribution of sales. Since its happening in the morning hours of the US, their sales traffic around this time would probably be a little above average as people probably buy stuff before they head to work. The overnight hours are probably very slow sales wise which would pull the numbers down from the daytime hours. The morning is more than likely not peak, which I would think would be in the evening or maybe during the lunch hours, so using the daily avg should suffice for a rough estimate. Not knowing their sales distribution by weekday vs weekend or by hours makes any closer estimate nearly impossible. Also, as pointed out, some people will retry their purchases after the site is restored, though the sales from impulsive buyers are likely lost for good. So, the estimates are probably skewed a bit, but shouldnt be too far off the actual losses. Besides, as the GP stated, its not news that they are down, its news in how bad its bleeding them, and putting a number on it makes it even more interesting even if it is skewed a bit.

tm

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[Doobian Coedifier]

Maybe this should be modded Funny, but it's sure as hell not Informative (it's a joke/troll, duh)

still not working AFAICT

[treeves]

I tried to click on a link for a DIY Home Chemistry Experiment Book and got:

We're sorry!

An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we're already working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly.

If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

  on the Amazon.com home page

thinks I am a robot

[hloo]

tried to access it from holland just now, got this message: We're sorry! You have been denied access to this feature because we believe you violated the terms, conditions, rules, guidelines or policies of our site in the past. If you believe we have taken this action in error, you may contact us at ad-help-us@amazon.com. We apologize for the inconvenience. Frequently Asked Questions Q: Why am I seeing this page? A: This page is usually shown when we believe that the request is coming from a robot or other automated source of requests. If you are not a robot please contact us immediately by emailing ad-help-us@amazon.com and we will reinstate your access to our website.

Re:thinks I am a robot

[jnana]

I got this too, and I thought it was because I set up a little script that checked the homepage every 5 seconds to let me know when it came back up (because I wanted to purchase something today and get it ASAP).

I sent them an email to that address, and I had access again an hour later. I didn't get a response from them though, so I don't know if they did something to unblock my IP address or if it had nothing to do with my script and was just related to the outage.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I would login to post this but I'm afraid of losing my "mole".

I received word about 30 minutes ago that Amazon has been the victim of a DDoS attack this morning. At first, their Ops team didn't realize they were under attack and thought it was a traffic spike related to a promotion, but after about an hour of throwing hardware at the surge they realized what it was. And once they tubed the source IPs in the botnet another crop of zombies showed up.

It looks like they are getting a handle on it now as things are better. Bad day to work in Ops at Amazon I guess. I'm cracking a beer in your honor now, fellas. Good luck.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I would login to post this but I'm afraid of losing my "mole".

I lost a mole once. The doctor was the father of a friend of mine. It was at risk of going cancerous. It was probably a very good thing.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I too have a mole. Another DDOS came and took down most of Amazon around the world. From my mole, all user-agents had ru in them.

I find the worst part about this statistic

[Anonymous Coward]

is that it assumes that they are loosing 31k a minute.. because people won't try back and buy the product. This is on par with the "a billion people DL'd my song from Napster, I lost all that money" when in reality, it sucks, was deleted 1/2 way thru the first listen.

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[juuri]

amazon.com.myserver.net as a dns record too

OLD CROTCHETY MAN MODE:

HOST RECORD

AWS and EC2

[DrHanser]

A bit strange, the people wondering why this is news. Amazon provides the backend for a number of web services with their EC2 and AWS platforms. This is going to make third parties seriously consider whether or not they want to trust Amazon with their business.

That is yet another reason why this is Real News(tm).

Re:AWS and EC2

[dave420]

Not particularly. Their S3 and EC2 services are completely seperate from their webserver. All throughout this outage, S3 and EC2 have been running flawlessly, as usual. If anything, this is a great reflection on how resilient their clusters are.

Re:AWS and EC2

[DrHanser]

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.

Re:AWS and EC2

[afidel]

Actually the PHB would be right, for most companies they are significantly less at risk of DDOS than EC2/AWS is. Not only that, but for a company like mine where perhaps 60-70% of the staff works at HQ there is no chance for a DDOS to affect their productivity.

Re:AWS and EC2

[dave420]

Well, surely the decision on what to use will be made by someone with technical knowledge, not some PHB. And if not, the technical people that bought it to their attention can explain the situation. Any company where technically-illiterate people make IT decisions doesn't deserve to operate. And yet they still do :)

Get better Amazon, we love you! (T_T)

[__aailob1448]

Amazon: A credit to Jeff Bezos. I love Amazon prime, I enjoy my Kindle, I like the prices and the one click purchases and the mp3 previews and the look inside the book and the no-bullshit mp3 store (which I don't use) and the useful reviews and the decent recommendations, etc ! Amazon almost never leaves a bad taste in my mouth and keeps innovating with features that are actually not RETARDED or HOSTILE to me! ZOMG!

Amazon is as good as eBay-Paypal is evil. Both are outstanding products but one is loved and one is hated.

Sooo...in the time that I wrote this post, Amazon lost enough money to sustain me my entire life. That's sad.

Re:Get better Amazon, we love you! (T_T)

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon is not perfect. There was an incident about a year ago where they changed all the users pseudonyms (on book reviews and such) into
  REAL USER NAME "Pseudonym"

They did that to all the users pseudonyms across the board. So people who had written what was before an anonymous review of "The Joy of Anal Sex" now suddenly had their real name next to their pseudonym attached to their review for the world to see!

There was lots of outcry and within a few days they reverted everything back and made it an option as to whether you want your real name attached to reviews or not.

Re:Get better Amazon, we love you! (T_T)

[__aailob1448]

That, and their hold over the one click buy patent, among other things. No, Amazon is not perfect, but it's significantly more likeable than not.

Cost of outage

[sugarmotor]

a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average.

I don't trust this; some people may buy later if there is an outage, no?

Stephan

Re:Cost of outage

[yorugua]

a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average.

I don't trust this; some people may buy later if there is an outage, no?

Stephan

and maybe some others may not. within that hour, some may reconsider, others may go to other website. A two hours outage might mean $80.000 in lost sales, because more people decided to buy will start looking someplace else.

Re:Cost of outage

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon has been around for a while, and have a pretty darn good track record for their site stability. If people have been shopping there for some time (and they have), I highly doubt they're suddenly going to say, "Uh oh, the website is having problems. I don't know if I can trust amazon anymore...I'm going to forever more do all my shopping at the individual retailer sites, thereby inconveniencing myself quite nicely."

It's not like people have seen websites having trouble loading or coming up before. Really, I think amazon will be okay.

Re:Cost of outage

[sugarmotor]

Some might, some might not.

It just looks a little simple to divide revenue of a quarter down to the hour and use that as an estimate for the cost of the outage.

For example I wouldn't be surprised if half of the buyers return later on to order the books they couldn't because of an outage.

Stephan

Re:Cost of outage

[maglor_83]

I don't trust this; some people may buy later if there is an outage, no? Most people I imagine. And even assuming they didn't, it doesn't take into account the costs they're not incurring during the outage either.

Great move!

[PontifexPrimus]

[...]thereby increasing awareness about the site." Yeah, I never heard of those ah-mah-zon guys before... what do they sell, anyway? Warrior women?

Re:Great move!

[fireboy1919]

Yes, they do.

Which is cheesy awesome.

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[Chapter80]

Who's the ass-clown that marked this informative?

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you make some random completely uninformed guess and say "more than likely". I could think of thousands of other possible problems, but somehow, because it happened to you once, it's "more than likely".

Blame it on Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it was due to people who also wanted to commend about how Ubuntu is the worst game ever?:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ubuntu_Worst_Game_Ever

OMG!

[Anonymous Coward]

How will we stop the turrists if we cannot shop?

IMDb

[Dachannien]

IMDb, which is owned and operated by Amazon, was down for a little while as well.

Again

[Javi0084]

It's down again.

Down again

[jnana]

It was just down for me again at 15:08 PST (same "service unavailable" HTTP error), after it had been working again for a while, so they clearly have not completely resolved whatever the issues were.

Amazon wishlist widget temporarily down

[paulthomas]

I run a blog that uses one of amazon's wishlist widgets, and my first indication that something was wrong was that my wishlist wasn't being loaded in the side bar.

Amazon declares outage is over. Light on details.

[CorporalKlinger]

CNET has updated the post to include a statement from Amazon.com that the outage is over. The total downtime was something like 5 hours. From the CNET follow-up article:

"But as to the explanation, the company only hinted that its complicated computing infrastructure was, unsurprisingly, a culprit.

'Amazon's systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible," the company said, declining to comment further.'"

HTML::Mason

[Eubeleus]

The Mason HQ wiki says the front-end is still all done in Mason.

Re: if you don't like the GNU linker use Gold

[sodul]

Gold is about 5 times faster than the regular GNU linker. It will only work on x86 code (64bits included) and ELF targets (linux/solaris)

Loosing money for one hour?

[cazbar]

Half the technology news organizations just gave them a free advertisement. I think they can make up for one hour.

They were hacked

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless & until they issue a retraction, I seriously think that they were hacked the old fashioned way. Forget this new age DDOS & DNS crap that isn't a "hack" so much as it's a weapon. I just hope the hackers didn't get __my__ credit card number. Chances are they caught onto what was happening too late.

also down

[JDHannan]

IMDB has been down for well over an hour. Thats kinda news isnt it?

Re:Amazon declares outage is over. Light on detail

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Amazon.com employee, I vaguely know what happened. All I'll say is that the outage wasn't completely due to internal sources :)

Anyone else see CC auth issues with Amazon?

[CrtxReavr]

Yesterday I was having major issues with Amazon's CC auth. I placed an order, it accepted my CC credentials, but about two hours later, I'd get an E-mail saying:


Your credit card payment for the above transaction could not be completed.
An issuing bank will often decline an attempt to charge a credit card if
the name, expiration date, or ZIP Code you entered at Amazon.com does not
exactly match the bank's information.

Valid credit card information must be received within 3 days, otherwise
your order will be void.


I re-tried the same CC, two hours later, got the same. Then I called the CC company and they said there was no issues with the card and they could even see the pre-auth from Amazon for the correct amount. Then I called Amazon's customer (non-)service and was fed a "Well, it's gotta be your financial institution line."

Re-tried the card again, same issue.

Called Amazon cust-service again, only this time I got a more helpful person on the phone. She put me on hold for four minutes to investigate, then came back on and just as she began explaining what the problem was, the call was dropped.

At his point, I re-tried with another card (one that I use all day, every day), same issue.

At this point I called Amazon again, but was told they couldn't access my order because their customer services system was being "upgraded."

Did anyone else experience, similar?

I should also mention that today I've used both cards and different retailers with no issues.

Amazon blocked me from the Site Today

[cbeley]

After searching for something using kanji (just out of curiosity to see if it would be on the US amazon), amazon started giving me a "we're sorry" page today, basically saying that I was banned.
I sent them a couple e-mails, but I guess I'm seeing that because their system is messed up...I hope. Either way, it's really annoying.

now IMDb is down?

[Hulleye]

I don't know if it's just me doing something wrong, but it seems IMDb is down. Amazon seems to be working fine right now though.

IMDb

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this has something to do with why IMDb is now down to. At least for me and http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

DoS Attack?

[jalfreize]

A friend interning at Amazon says it was a DDoS attack, and it happened right when they were having an all-hands meeting.

Re:wtf -- is boingboing moderating slashdot now to

[something_wicked_thi]

He used up his vowel quota in the first word.

Amazon Should Read "I.T. Wars"

[johnfranks999]

Amazon is another business that needs to run to the library for "I.T. Wars: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium." The irony is, Amazon sells it. I urge every business person and IT person, management or staff, to get hold of a copy of this book. Our CEO has read it. Our project managers are on their second reading. Our vendors are required to read it (they can borrow our copies if they don't want to purchase it). Any agencies that wish to partner with us: We ask that they read it. Do yourself a favor and read this book - then ask your boss to read it - then ask your staff and co-workers to read it. If you get a chance, read the author's interview here: http://www.businessforum.com/DScott_02.html

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/terrorism/alqa

[Anonymous Coward]

with this

I hear they internet out California way

[walterbyrd]

A major web-site off-line for hour, oh the horror, the HORROR!

Re:Amazon Should Read "I.T. Wars"

[Slashcrap]

Amazon is another business that needs to run to the library for "I.T. Wars: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium." The irony is, Amazon sells it. I urge every business person and IT person, management or staff, to get hold of a copy of this book. Our CEO has read it. Our project managers are on their second reading. Our vendors are required to read it (they can borrow our copies if they don't want to purchase it). Any agencies that wish to partner with us: We ask that they read it. Do yourself a favor and read this book - then ask your boss to read it - then ask your staff and co-workers to read it. If you get a chance, read the author's interview here: http://www.businessforum.com/DScott_02.html Does it cure massive faggotry? If so, you should probably read it a few more times.

Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d.

[Em Adespoton]

I love how AC says I say "more than likely" when I said "more likely (than a DNS issue)". Why not suggest one of your thousands of other problems instead of criticizing me for suggesting a common error that matches the scenario is more likely than an error that obviously hasn't happened?