Amazon.com is down…
Written on June 6, 2008 – 8:45 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
A few hours ago I bought a few books in anticipation of my next holiday. I do hope they got through before the servers crashed. Yep, Amazon is down with a ‘Http/1.1 Service Unavailable’ error message:
Sometimes reloading does get you some content but then the next page you click to shows you the error message again.
UPDATE I:
Just found this interesting comment on Digg:
Amazon sells over 150,000 books a day.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day
Amazon is losing approximately two book sales every second they’re down.
A profit of $5/book would be losing $10 every second.
For every hour they’re down that would be losing $36,000.
But you figure that it is peak hours for web traffic, so I would estimate double that.
Amazon is losing approximately $72,000 per hour.
Then again I have no idea how much profit they make. But no doubt, they’re losing thousands of dollars by the minute.
Venturebeat has a post up with some details about the outage too. They say Cnet estimated that a global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute. But Amazon sites in other countries aren’t down so it is likely to be less than that.
UPDATE II:
Oh boy, Amazon is still down but not displaying the http error anymore. There new error page seems to imply that the outage is actually your fault. Check it out:
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.
UPDATE III
Email from Amazon PR (from Techcrunch):
The Amazon retail site was down for approximately 2 hours earlier today (beginning around 10:25) – and we’re bringing the site back up.
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.
Amazon’s web services were not affected nor were our international sites
UPDATE IV:
Amazon is back with a vengeance! Stronger and faster than ever. Lets all buy a few books now and try to make up for that lost revenue…
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By George on Jun 6, 2008
Amazon is back online.
George - http://worldonblog.com/
[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jun 6, 2008
Hi George, thanks for letting us know! I tried it myself and still received the ‘bad doggy’ page. After a few reload though I did get through and the site seems speedier than earlier today before the outage.
[Reply]
By Jesse on Jun 7, 2008
You can’t assume they are losing any business from being down. People that plan to buy something from Amazon will just buy it after the site comes back up. An outage only delays an inevitable transaction.
If they generated revenue from advertising, then you might be on to something.
You are using the same logic that drives people to make those “National Don’t Buy Gas Day” Facebook groups.
[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jun 7, 2008
Hi Jesse, you are absolutely right. I can imagine some people going to other online bookstores but that percentage will be very small.
[Reply]