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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."

8 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 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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    2. Re:Hmm... by xevioso · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Some people will go back, some people will not. The point is there does not seem to be any indication that this number was taken into account when the 4.9$ million number was estimated. Perhaps the first hour it's offline they "lose" 4.9$million, but the next hour it comes back on they make 8$million when they normally would have only made 4.9$million. There's no way to know.

  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+Psychopath · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      I'm glad you aren't in charge of payroll.

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      Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

  3. 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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  4. 404 Error? by dnahelicase · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe Amazon should consider moving to the cloud...

  5. Re:or maybe by Applekid · · Score: 5, Funny

    they didn't lose that much and people decided their spatula purchase could wait a few hours

    Amazon? Spatulas? Everyone knows to get your spatulas at Spatula City.

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    More Twoson than Cupertino