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Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins

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Re: Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins

#11

Post by biot »

cdh wrote: post #5
hkmurakami wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 webs…

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.

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.

Re: Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins

#13

Post by big_co »

cdh wrote: post #5
hkmurakami wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 webs…

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.

It's not free if they lost millions of dollars in the process. The % of people in your situation is probably less than 1, so the net is still a loss.

Re: Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins

#14

Post by larrys »

biot wrote: post #11
cdh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 do…

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).

Re: Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins

#15

Post by edanm »

gkoberger wrote: post #2

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... (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)

Funny anecdote:

I checked out Twitter for the first time in a while to see if anyone was talking about the Amazon outage. I ran a search for "Amazon", and one of the tweets I saw was Scott Hanselman linking to his review of the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, which included a review of the Kindle Cover. The review was pretty convincing, so I ended up buying the cover yesterday night.

So in a way, Amazon's outage yesterday directly resulted in me ordering a $35 product from Amazon.

This probably (inconclusively of course) confirms what other people are saying here - I'm not surprised that Amazon gets some free PR from this mess, which earns evens out any potential lost revenue.

Re: Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins

#16

Post by agiamas »

hkmurakami wrote: post #4
gkoberger wrote: post #2

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... (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)

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 webs…

Exactly. An outage in the homepage once every X years won't result in lost revenue, you'll just login an hour later coz you have already settled in buying from amazon for 100 other reasons. An outage every day on the other hand...Totally different story, you start feeling inconvenience and end up somewhere else.
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