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Amazon.com Suffers Outage: Nearly $5M Down the Drain?

Posted by timothy on from the what-is-the-richter-scale-for-net-outages? dept.

First time accepted submitter Brandon Butler writes "Amazon.com, the multi-billion online retail website, experienced an outage of unknown proportions on Thursday afternoon. Rumblings of an Amazon.com outage began popping up on Twitter at about 2:40 PM ET. Multiple attempts to access the site around 3:15 PM ET on Thursday were met with the message: 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.' By 3:30 PM ET the site appeared to be back online for at least some users. How big of a deal is an hour-long Amazon outage? Amazon.com's latest earnings report showed that the company makes about $10.8 billion per quarter, or about $118 million per day and $4.9 million per hour." Update: 01/31 22:25 GMT by T : "Hackers claim credit."

11 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, if a website is down, and someone goes to buy something, that means they are unable to purchase it later when the site is back up?

    The logic behind how they arrived at that number is slightly flawed.

    1. Re:Hmm... by Lawrence_Bird · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well.. Timothy wrote the headline... what makes you think he has ever used logic? But yes, the amount "lost" is probably a small fraction.

    2. Re:Hmm... by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But Brandon Butler wrote the summary, and lifted the calculations directly from Network World, so a lot of people just assume that people try exactly once, then give up and never return.

      Its totally silly of course, because Amazon often has the best prices, and people will simply wait. Nothing purchased on line constitutes an emergency to most people.

      The cost to Amazon is probably not really that great. There might be some hourly people sitting around doing nothing. Some network staff might have been called in to work overtime.

      But averaged over a month, I doubt there will be an actual drop in sales.

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    3. Re:Hmm... by NatasRevol · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not to mention that the $10.8B number is sales revenue, not earnings. So it's NOT how much they make in a quarter.

      They actually only earned $97M last quarter. Or $7.5M per week or $1M per day. Or $41,000 per hour.

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    4. Re:Hmm... by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Yeah, but don't discount the number of people who "impulse buy"...and if given time to think about it...they may decide they don't really need it.

      With a company doing the volume of business that Amazon is doing, I have to think that would be significant with that segment of the market alone?

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    5. Re:Hmm... by rubycodez · · Score: 1, Insightful

      you mean you are cluesless as to what those tools are really telling you. Amazon lost essentially zero, and yes most of the buyers came back later at their convenience.

  2. Call the Waaaahmbulance? by Scarletdown · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sounds more like that was 5 million in potential dollars not earned, not 5 million lost. You can't lose what you do not yet have.

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    1. Re:Call the Waaaahmbulance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Tell that to the RIAA and MPAA

  3. Re:I'd hate to be... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The $5M figure assumes that 100% of the people that would have shopped at Amazon that hour purchased what they wanted elsewhere, rather than just trying back later, which I would bet a vast majority did.

  4. Assumptions... by Anubis350 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This assumes that amazon makes a constant amount every hour, as opposed to peak vs. off-peak business hours. This also assumes that the bulk of their business took their purchases elsewhere while Amazon was done, which I'm not inclined to believe is necessarily true.
    Amazon probably lost money, I'm in doubt that it's anywhere close to 5M

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  5. Re:Not just Amazon.com webservers... by icebike · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Amazon has multiple data-centers.

    There is no one place where any specific service is hosted.
    For more then one of their offerings to be down from inside, and not from the outside, it might have been something like internal routers or switch gear, or perhaps an internal route advertising accident.

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