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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

#2

Post by 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...

(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)

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

#3

Post by jonah »

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)

Mitigating factors include:

  This is a very low time of the year for commerce.

  A certain (fairly large?) percentage of potential customers will simply return later in the day to make their purchases.

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

#4

Post by hkmurakami »

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 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

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

#5

Post by cdh »

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…

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.

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

#6

Post by 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...

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

#7

Post by hexonexxon »

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…

I bet that kid that went to jail for DDOSing Amazon back in the day would've liked to have this engineer's comment for his defence when they claimed he did 'millions' in damages

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

#8

Post by jspaur »

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)

But less than 4k in profit....wow those are some thin margins overall.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Amazon+profit%2F+%28...

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

#9

Post by mikeash »

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…

I've heard this sort of thing from other places, too. For example, independent software developers who run their own stores also observe that their revenue will wait out outages that aren't excessively long.

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

#10

Post by 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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