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."
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.
Hmmmm... sounds like they are being DoS'ed by MediaDefender.
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 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");
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.
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.
Out in the back, working on his car.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Yes, they do.
Which is cheesy awesome.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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.'"