
Amazon was Down - crc321
http://www.amazon.com/index.html
======
gkoberger
A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime
doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people
simply just come back later.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461>

[Edit: That being said, there's also the statistic that every 100ms of latency
costs Amazon 1%. Imagine what 20+ minutes of "latency" would do.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900>]

~~~
coldtea
> _A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime
> doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people
> simply just come back later._

Brick and mortar stores found that out ages ago. They were closed for large
parts of the day/night and the customers just came back the next day.

If people didn't leave Tumblr and Twitter, with their constant massive outages
(at some point in their life), when why would the leave Amazon, a huge
established player, for a few hours outage?

~~~
ams6110
I doubt many would leave Amazon permanently because of a service outage, but
it probably does cost them something in impulse purchases, if the impulsive
desire for the item passes during the downtime.

~~~
ryusage
No, you would think that, but actually if you read the comment referenced
above, what they actually found is that outages seem to have little effect on
revenues. That's why it's so surprising, really. The implication seems to be
that their customers don't actually spend a whole lot on impulse buys.

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geuis
This is just a small complaint coming many hours after this link was posted.
You linked to perhaps the most top-level URL amazon has available for a
temporary outage. This means a couple things. 1) Hours later, the outage is
over and I'm just hitting the home page. No specific information about what
you were reporting. 2) This specific link is, as far as I know, now no linger
available for other stories. That may not matter I the long run but it bares
mentioning.

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austenallred
At an estimated loss of $31,000 per minute
[http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html?tag=nefd.to...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html?tag=nefd.top)
I'm blown away that I see Amazon goes down so often. That certainly, in my
mind, doesn't bode well for the brand of AWS.

~~~
gry
Heroku is up: <http://cl.ly/image/0B0U1K3Z342R>.

Conversely, when AWS had issues, Amazon.com was not impacted.

Amazon.com != AWS. I'm curious to know when AWS or Amazon.com innovations
impact each other, or which one leads. I'd rather it be Amazon.com.

~~~
ceol
I think the gp was saying that the _brand_ — as in, the perception of AWS—
will suffer, not the actual services.

Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep a
website up for 100% of the time, so downtime at Amazon is understandable, but
maybe the average Joe Manager is deciding between Rackspace and AWS and
happens to visit amazon.com during this downtime. "If Amazon can't even keep
their bread-and-butter running, how can I trust them with something like AWS?"
he might say.

~~~
scottbruin
> Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep
> a website up for 100% of the time

As far as I know Google has 100% uptime, so it's not impossible. May not be
100% for every geographical location but that's partly because of things
Google cannot control nor make redundant.

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podperson
Somewhat off-topic: my (limited) experience with Amazon Prime video suggests
it's significantly less reliable than Netflix or iTunes (neither of which are
stupendously reliable, but I'd say Netflix is by far the most reliable of the
three). Hulu might actually be worse than Amazon Prime.

~~~
notimetorelax
I don't know if you saw this posted on HN, but Netflix test their system
really well. They use so-called chaos monkey [1] that shuts down random
servers on a whim. This allows them to detect and get rid of dependencies,
i.e. tolerate failures in other parts of the system.

[1] <http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html>

~~~
mistermumble
Isn't Netflix hosted on AWS?

~~~
svedlin
Netflix is indeed running on AWS. Some details about their back-end here:

[http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/aws-reinvent-was-
awesome...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/aws-reinvent-was-awesome.html)

------
rdl
Wow. Something this big means I'll bet it's a networking issue.

I wonder if they lose money for a brief outage, or if people just delay their
purchases. I seem to remember them graphing this somewhere.

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ketralnis
Do we really need a front-page post every time a well-known site has a hiccup?
It's bad enough getting it every time github does. What are you hoping for
here? A thread full of me-toos?

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lucb1e
Had downtime yesterdayevening (12 hours ago) as well in the Netherlands.
People from Germany were able to load the website (the .com version; .de
worked at all times), and after two hours I was able to as well. Upon trying
to add something to my cart it returned the same error 500 though, so that was
still down the last time I checked (about 10 hours ago). I'm not sure if or
when this was resolved.

I didn't submit this as story because I didn't think anyone would care, given
the recent call not to post downtimes. Given the #1 spot the story has now, it
seems I should have. So do people care or not?

------
argsv
<http://www.amazon.ca/> is OK.

I get Http/1.1 Service Unavailable on first two requests.

I got 500 with the message "We're very sorry, but we're having trouble doing
what you just asked us to do. Please give us another chance--click the Back
button on your browser and try your request again. Or start from the beginning
on our homepage. "

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ck2
Comes up for me <http://www.amazon.com/gp/cart/view.html>

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level09
<http://i.imgur.com/E8vAzKp.jpg>

~~~
simonster
I doubt that works when the site is up either. Many servers these days reject
pings.

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davorak
Doing fine here, both amazon.com and the AWS console.

~~~
rattray
here=where?

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michaelburk
I got a 500 error on amazon.com. Now just a timeout.

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seanp2k2
Can't get into AWS management console either.

~~~
ritchiea
I can't get to the management console or status.aws.amazon.com

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monksy
Sounds like someone that is oncall is going to have a bad night. Amazon.de and
.co.uk are up.

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mattbillenstein
There are two types of websites, those that have suffered downtime, and those
that will.

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ivabz
Seems like Only US market got goosebumps. UK looks fine and up.

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michaelrbock
And it's back up for me.

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itomatik
aws console seems fine to me. the amazon.com is down for sure.

~~~
andrewryno
Yeah same here. Amazon is throwing a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" but AWS
console is fine.

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DallaRosa
Amazon.com is back up

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danielovichdk
Use Windows Azure!

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rapcal
Back online

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gsibble
Browsing the site is nearly impossible at the moment.

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tquai
It's a lesson in overengineering. At this point my $5 Pentium 3 server has a
greater uptime than Amazon.

~~~
potatolicious
Your $5 Pentium 3 server isn't the largest retail website on the internet
making $61 billion a year.

Having _seen_ a lot of the code that Amazon runs on, and having seen first-
hand the scale that it runs on, I'll say this: it's not perfect, but it's
remarkably well-engineered, and a hell of a lot better than most snarky HNers
could do.

~~~
hhw
But that's the point. Most people don't need anything that well-engineered.
Compared to more traditional hosting solutions from quality providers, AWS has
terrible uptime and at a much higher cost for the same amount of resources.
Two VPS'es from two different providers in a simple failover configuration
with an anycast DNS solution would be simpler, cheaper, and much more
reliable.

~~~
hhw
Wow, apparently that last comment really hit a nerve, as several people
decided to downvote it, but not a single person actually refuted any of what I
said. I was under the impression that downvotes were more to be used against
trolling or flamebaiting, and not just opinions that people disagreed with.
Considering everything I said is quite easy to verify as being true, this
downvoting just strikes me as kind of intellectually dishonest. I expected
better from HN.

~~~
tquai
Yeah, I think there's a misunderstanding somewhere. Some people think I
believe a $5 computer could handle amazon.com's traffic, which is clearly
preposterous.

I know that almost all of my downtime comes from when I overengineer things.
And I don't need to "patch my kernel" because my OS doesn't have kernel holes
once a week. Linux isn't the only Unix OS out there.

Today, a lot of sysadmins believe that "LAMP" is a synonym for webserver, and
consequently there are a bunch of webservers serving static content on a
machine with way too many moving parts. Complexity is bad.

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." -- Albert
Einstein

