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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."
I guess somebody spilled beer on the servers? I had no idea the guys from FARK also ran Amazon.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
It works just fine for me right now.
Also now you are Slashdotting it!
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.
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....
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
Because this represents 31k USD every minute.
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.
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.
Hmmmm... sounds like they are being DoS'ed by MediaDefender.
Considering how big Amazon is, it's more like using a fire hose on an aircraft carrier, I think.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
4th edition D&D books came out today. Coincidence?
Not to nitpick or anything, but at $31,000 per minute, an hour outage would cost $1,860,000, not $31,000.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"$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).
I hope it's better than The Cuckoos Egg but I wouldn't know, I couldn't place my order for Stoll's book.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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...
Looks like you are the one who got pwn3d.
Sure! How 'bout:
It's like trying to break a car window by shooting spitballs at it....
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
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.
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...
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.
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
Hush, the troll ran out of fingers and toes.
There, there little troll. Please continue your nonsensical rant.
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
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
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.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
Out in the back, working on his car.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Who's the ass-clown that marked this informative?
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
yeah, swell, let's have amazon's servers encrypt all traffic, that'll reduce their server load.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
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.
No, that's me you're referring to.
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.'"
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)