

Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins - DK007
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/amazon-responds-to-outage-confirms-offline-for-49-mins-aws-unaffected-outside-groups-uninvolved/

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gkoberger
Using _very_ naïve calculations, it looks like they lost up to $5 million in
revenue because of this.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Amazon.com%27s+annua...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Amazon.com%27s+annual+revenue+%2F+%28minutes+in+a+year%29%29+*+49+minutes)

(This ignores a lot of important factors: not all pages being down, it
happening in peak US hours, not accounting for the uninterrupted AWS revenue,
having to purchase new hardware, damaged brand, etc)

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hkmurakami
A former Amazon.com engineer in the other discussion thread has indicated that
Amazon never seemed to lose revenue during these outages.

 _> During my time as an engineer working on Amazon.com, we occasionally
experienced outages of various lengths. One of the surprising details about
these outages is that they really didn't result in any revenue loss. That is,
it appeared that customers would simply wait until the website was available
again to make their purchase. I would be surprised if that effect doesn't
still happen today especially with the availability of Amazon on a variety of
platforms (i.e. customers are comfortable ordering from their phones when they
couldn't get to the website from their desktop computers)._

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

~~~
cdh
Not to mention, it's free PR. I'd forgotten I needed to order some stuff, but
this reminded me, and so I placed the order once they were back up. I'm not
sure how common that reaction is, but it might offset the downtime to some
extent.

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biot
This almost makes me wonder whether a startup should identify easily-fixed
weak points in its architecture and work on the fix so that it's ready to go,
but don't deploy it. When the weak point eventually fails, rush to deploy the
ready-made fix and then include a wonderful technical post-mortem of what
happened, how you overcame an architectural weakness, and post it on High
Scalability and submit it to HN. Small downtime; big PR boost.

~~~
larrys
A fine idea for a one or two man shop but if with a larger organization you
then have a conspiracy. If word leaks could cause some major issues (along
with more publicity).

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sandfox
For a potential reason why this might not make any difference to Amazons
revenue/sales/whatever one should read this gem of a past by John Allspaw (Ops
whiz kid for those who have no idea who he is) ::
[http://www.kitchensoap.com/2013/01/03/availability-nuance-
as...](http://www.kitchensoap.com/2013/01/03/availability-nuance-as-a-
service/)

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greghinch
> Site outages are never good things but feel particularly shaky when they are
> linked to e-commerce sites or other places where user data is stored.

Or, you know, when we've trusted the affected company in turn to run the
infrastructure for so many of our businesses.

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j2bax
I'm not sure if it was related but Amazon wouldn't let me rent a movie
tonight... Tried on multiple platforms (directly from PS3, website) Not cool!

