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US Amazon.com Website Down For Over 1 Hour
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jun 06, 2008 02:10 PM
from the there-goes-the-bottom-line dept.
from the there-goes-the-bottom-line dept.
CorporalKlinger writes "CNET News is reporting that Amazon's US website, Amazon.com, has been unreachable since 10:30 AM PDT today. As of posting, visiting www.amazon.com produces an 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable' message. According to CNET, "Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average." Some of Amazon's international websites still appear to be working, and some pages on the US Amazon.com site load if accessed using HTTPS instead of HTTP."
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Beer on the server? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Beer on the server? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not like there are a lot of alternatives out there. Sure, some specialized places might fill part of the bill, but once you've become accustomed to Amazon, you more or less stick with em.
Parent
But... (Score:5, Informative)
Also now you are Slashdotting it!
This will surely help (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This will surely help (Score:5, Insightful)
Only exceptions would be if there was a lot of heavy content being served on each page turn, saturation of one's uplink is a possibility - 10Gb links to the backbone aren't that common as yet, and CDNs like Akamai helps alleviate a good portion of that traffic.
My totally unsubstantiated guess is there was some DNS fooage that directed sites to a down cluster or possibly a screwed up CDN leg, but I'll be interested to see what's truly up.
sloth jr
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Re:This will surely help (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This will surely help (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:This will surely help (Score:5, Insightful)
Digg sends far more traffic to a site than Slashdot does (obviously it wasn't always this way). And digg's traffic isn't particularly noteworthy to a site of any reasonable size. (Say, Ars Technica, nevermind amazon.)
Yahoo Buzz, on the other hand, sends *huge* amounts of traffic, noticeable to sites like, again, Ars but again no disruptions of service*. But I doubt that amazon would even hiccup. If you think slashdot would even be a blip on amazon's radar, you have some serious delusions about 1) slashdot's size 2) amazon's size or 3) both.
* According to one of the devs.
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Patents (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Patents (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Great move! (Score:5, Funny)
Which is cheesy awesome.
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So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe me, if you've seen the code that runs that site, it's impressive it runs as well as it does. Try to imagine 900M static binaries that take almost an hour to link because of some tiny little code change, because they can't be fucked to make their deployment system deal with dynamic libraries reasonably.
Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe me, if you've seen the code that runs that site, it's impressive it runs as well as it does. Try to imagine 900M static binaries that take almost an hour to link because of some tiny little code change, because they can't be fucked to make their deployment system deal with dynamic libraries reasonably.
Fuck up a dynamic library and you fuck everything. Fuck up one of those 900M programs and you've fucked 1/900M'th of everything.
What does Amazon's back end compile for? If it's Linux, that's an issue right there. The GNU linker has pathological behavior when linking large numbers of static libraries. I work on a relatively small (~1 million line) codebase and it takes about ten minutes to link. Link it on another platform (e.g. Solaris) and it links in about five seconds.
The problem isn't the huge number of libraries. The problem is that the linker blows.
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Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:4, Informative)
GP is approximately 3 years out of date. See Gurupa [wikipedia.org]
Since I can't give any details directly, I'll let wiki [wikipedia.org] do it.
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Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously. She didn't even say what language or what platform they're running on, which is more useful and easy for even a non-employee to figure out.
D&D did it. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:D&D did it. (Score:5, Funny)
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(partially) works for me... (Score:3, Informative)
So, it seems to be working...at times.
How much lost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if accurate, that's assuming everyone who sees the error message will go somewhere else to buy their books.
I imagine some people would just wait to buy the book from amazon later when it is up again (probably very soon).
They Think I'm a Robot (Score:5, Funny)
Well I think THEY are the robot. I don't know if I can win this argument...
Re:They Think I'm a Robot (Score:4, Funny)
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The problem isn't Amazon . . . (Score:5, Funny)
$31,000 per minute! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$31,000 per minute! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they will frequently come back, yes. But the site being down also affects consumer confidence in a big way and that will make fewer people likely to go to the site.
So, using the metric of exactly how much you sell in a given time period is likely inaccurate, but I suspect the actual impact is higher, not lower.
Parent
thinks I am a robot (Score:3, Interesting)
AWS and EC2 (Score:3, Interesting)
A bit strange, the people wondering why this is news. Amazon provides the backend for a number of web services with their EC2 and AWS platforms. This is going to make third parties seriously consider whether or not they want to trust Amazon with their business.
That is yet another reason why this is Real News(tm).
Re:AWS and EC2 (Score:5, Informative)
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Get better Amazon, we love you! (T_T) (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazon is as good as eBay-Paypal is evil. Both are outstanding products but one is loved and one is hated.
Sooo...in the time that I wrote this post, Amazon lost enough money to sustain me my entire life. That's sad.
Cost of outage (Score:4, Interesting)
Stephan
Amazon declares outage is over. Light on details. (Score:5, Informative)
"But as to the explanation, the company only hinted that its complicated computing infrastructure was, unsurprisingly, a culprit.
'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," the company said, declining to comment further.'"
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:We're sorry... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Sure! How 'bout:
It's like trying to break a car window [youtube.com] by shooting spitballs [wikipedia.org] at it....
Re:Analogy (Score:5, Funny)
Out in the back, working on his car.
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Re:Analogy (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There, there little troll. Please continue your nonsensical rant.
Re:OH NOES (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd have to factor in the ratio of income from the
US site v others (UK, etc.). IMHO, the US site is likely to be more profitable than others. You'd have to plow through an annual report to really know, and factor that in.
The larger flaw, though, is that you're subtracting one minute, when the title states > 1 hour. That implies going on A couple of million US$ in losses, which is significant, as investors don't know the reason, and caution would indicate that it could be recurring, such as the problems SalesForce has had. That hit their stock prices, etc.
The Amazon outage is more complex--TFA indicates that some of their services were unavailable for different amounts of time, etc. What are those service worth? All anyone has is a number--from CNET. Did they do anything like a real analysis, reading quarterly reports, etc? No, by long odds. Amazon does application hosting. What customers were affected, what percentage of the business is involved, and what do CxOs of large clients think?
The odds are actually quite good that many people give a crap. Investors (and CxOs) don't like uncertainty. It wouldn't surprise me to find some Wall Street analyst(s) making calls. Maybe it was an outage on a critical replication server, problem identified, fixed, and will provably never happen again. But maybe not. We'll see.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d. (Score:5, Informative)
However, as has been pointed out, HTTPS works, so it's defininitely not a DNS issue. More likely someone along the chain corrupted a pooling link to the main http server and it propogated. I've done the same thing on apache2 servers in the past and had the same result; https still works fine, but http returns an error on key pages.
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Re:do a whois. Looks like DNS got pwn3d. (Score:5, Informative)
A fully-qualified DNS domain name ends with a dot, so you should type 'whois amazon.com.' instead.
Those "hacked" results you are getting are just bogus amazon.com.foo.bar. subdomains.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's a giant cube farm, and their code is like some sort of crawling horror of reanimated spaghetti which long ago swallowed up and devoured all documentation. And then there's the deployment system. As I mentioned in another comment on this article, it can't deal with dynamic libraries. When I left, it was a real and immediate issue how we were going to keep a certain product's dependencies small enough that it would be able to *link* in a 32-bit virtual address space. The linker was up to something li