Amazon.com Suffers Outage: Nearly $5M Down the Drain? 173
First time accepted submitter Brandon Butler writes "Amazon.com, the multi-billion online retail website, experienced an outage of unknown proportions on Thursday afternoon. Rumblings of an Amazon.com outage began popping up on Twitter at about 2:40 PM ET. Multiple attempts to access the site around 3:15 PM ET on Thursday were met with the message: 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.' By 3:30 PM ET the site appeared to be back online for at least some users. How big of a deal is an hour-long Amazon outage? Amazon.com's latest earnings report showed that the company makes about $10.8 billion per quarter, or about $118 million per day and $4.9 million per hour." Update: 01/31 22:25 GMT by T : "Hackers claim credit."
Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if a website is down, and someone goes to buy something, that means they are unable to purchase it later when the site is back up?
The logic behind how they arrived at that number is slightly flawed.
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Well.. Timothy wrote the headline... what makes you think he has ever used logic? But yes, the amount "lost" is probably a small fraction.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
But Brandon Butler wrote the summary, and lifted the calculations directly from Network World, so a lot of people just assume that people try exactly once, then give up and never return.
Its totally silly of course, because Amazon often has the best prices, and people will simply wait. Nothing purchased on line constitutes an emergency to most people.
The cost to Amazon is probably not really that great. There might be some hourly people sitting around doing nothing. Some network staff might have been called in to work overtime.
But averaged over a month, I doubt there will be an actual drop in sales.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
With a company doing the volume of business that Amazon is doing, I have to think that would be significant with that segment of the market alone?
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On the other hand, some percentage of those impulse buys would have had enough buyer's remorse to cancel or return their order. That would have cost money to process.
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Or the folks who couldn't wait and went with eBay instead, or NewEgg or whatever. There are a dozen reasons why a one hour delay might have impacted whether a particular purchase happened or not. Still you wouldn't expect that to impact more than several percent, which if you think about it would still be a few hundred thousand dollars.
One thing that might have had an even bigger impact, might be the fact that it would have impacted the ACTUAL cashflow today, even if the total sales is impacted only slightl
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Or the folks who couldn't wait and went with eBay instead
Couldn't wait and went with eBay? Haha...
So you have to participate in an auction, wait until it is over (several days), and see your deal sniped away from you at the last minute while you're away. Ok, rinse, lathe, repeat.
After 3 or more attempts (taking each a couple of days, due to the auction's durations), just pick a "buy now" offering that looks juicy.
Unfortunately, the seller is an amateur who simply forgets to send the goods for two weeks. After reminder, he overnights it to you.
But then, surpri
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This isn't news to anyone but you, by the way.
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Are you referring to the seller stores that they've had for years? I don't get how they're really any different than the rest of ebay, aside from the buy-it-now versus auction format. If that is what you're referring to, they have the same problem - we don't trust ebay for the issues ArsenneLupin mentioned.
Why would someone buy something off ebay that isn't an item that's no longer made or some cheap import (I bought some LEDs once that would fall into that category)? I'd never consider buying, say, a
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Its totally silly of course, because Amazon often has the best prices, and people will simply wait. Nothing purchased on line constitutes an emergency to most people.
Your definition of "emergency" and mine radically differ. I call it 'Tuesday' when there's five feet of fresh snow on the ground, over my house, my car, and I need to be to work in an hour. I'm more concerned about a broken coffee machine at work than some website going tits up for a few hours. Even if all the websites went tits up for a few hours, or days, it's not an emergency in my book. Emergency for me qualifies as "significant and immediate risk to life and safety," not "I can't order a copy of Call o
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Which is exactly why I said:
Nothing purchased on line constitutes an emergency to most people.
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Technically, what I said is exactly what I said.
(Nothing purchased on line) (constitutes an emergency).
The verb was constitutes, not purchasing.
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As soon as you stop parsing english as if it were math you'll be fine.
The structure I used has been around for hundreds of years.
Google the quoted phrase "nothing constitutes" to see hundreds of examples.
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It's a poorly worded sentence.
No, English is simply a poorly designed language, if your definition of good design is a complete lack of ambiguity. A far superior language is the x86 instruction set which of course has been documented out the wazoo. So, please translate your sentence into opcodes for me... :)
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Uhm... technically, what you said is, "Purchasing nothing online constitutes an emergency to most people."
I scrolled back, and icebike did indeed say "Nothing purchased on line constitutes an emergency to most people" in his first post, rather than your version. That's the advantage of written media, you can scroll back to the original comment, and check what really was said.
So what's your point of (literally...) twisting his words around? Yes, if you change word order, and replace past participium (purchased) with present participium (purchasing), then a sentence can be made to mean the opposite of what was i
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Fixing a computer for an accountant and with tax season starting up it was rather an emergency
If it really was just that much of an emergency, you'd have rushed out to town, paid 50% more, and got it immediately...
however given that I have the whole weekend to finish the machine up I suppose not really
indeed...
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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How the fuck could you POSSIBLY know this?
Your site is down, you have no idea how many tried and went elsewhere.
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you mean you are cluesless as to what those tools are really telling you. Amazon lost essentially zero, and yes most of the buyers came back later at their convenience.
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Of course, all depends on how steady the volumes usually are. If there are usually large swings from
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You don't have those figures for the times that your site was down. And I doubt your noise floor is so low that you could pick up the customers who couldn't buy something during that one hour stopping back over the next few days.
Suppose that they'd normally sell $5M/hr. They're down for 15 minutes - that is about $1.25M in lost sales. People come back over the next 48 hours to make their purchases - that is an increase in net sales over that period of $26k/hr - or 0.5%. Are you really going to notice wh
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Yes, we know what GA does. Which of those metrics gives you insight into how many customers go elsewhere during downtime?
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We even know your browser, screen resolution, OS, the color underwear you wear,
... and then you wonder why people are so mistrusting of javascript...?
(Technically, the browser and OS can be read from the user-agent header, and needs no javascript. But the screen resolution and color of underwear sure does need javascript!)
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If you are down, you have no metrics. Because, you are DOWN! So stop with this "oh I have numbers" nonsense. The customer that buys 10 minutes after you resumed operations, or 10 hours after is just as likely to be someone who tried earlier when you were down. You have no way of knowing, because your site was DOWN.
Its a big enough impediment to set up another account, hand over your credit card to yet another web site, that I would wait an hour, maybe five, because I know Amazon will be back in short or
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Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people will go back, some people will not. The point is there does not seem to be any indication that this number was taken into account when the 4.9$ million number was estimated. Perhaps the first hour it's offline they "lose" 4.9$million, but the next hour it comes back on they make 8$million when they normally would have only made 4.9$million. There's no way to know.
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Indeed, Amazon should be able to use statistical methods to work out, within some reasonable margin of error, just what percentage of people did come back and which went to buy elsewhere. It would be interesting to see that figure, though I don't suppose they'll release it.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that the $10.8B number is sales revenue, not earnings. So it's NOT how much they make in a quarter.
They actually only earned $97M last quarter. Or $7.5M per week or $1M per day. Or $41,000 per hour.
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The logic behind how they arrived at that number is slightly flawed.
I'd say they used RIAA & MPAA math.
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Not enough superfluous zeroes for that to be true.
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I'm in perfect agreement with this comment. Some lost sales are inevitable from this downtime, but the $4.9 million number is based on unwarranted assumptions.
We'll know better what the impact is at their next quarterly statement (if they're honest)
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Also, were all of Amazon's services down?
The country-specific sites (e.g. Amazon.co.de)?
Zappos.com?
Audible.com?
How about the cloud services (Amazon makes money on those, also)?
Also, why should we believe Thursday afternoon at the end of January represents an average shopping hour for Amazon?
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I was going to say the same, people merely placed there orders a couple hours later, not dropped the order altogether or decided to drop amazon altogether. Just a small glitch that won't even be noticed when their earnings come out. As pitiful as those earnings are, given the company's market cap
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The actual cost is hard to calculate :
Most people don't 'stumble' upon Amazon : they go there for a reason. So they will wait until the site is back up.
People who did accidentally stumble upon Amazon ( just googling for a product ) , will see a site that doesn't work, and ignore it, so that might be a lost purchase.
However, I think the biggest cost might come from the knowledge that Amazon got hacked : even if hackers didn't get anywhere near the users' credit card information, most people won't understand
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So, if a website is down, and someone goes to buy something, that means they are unable to purchase it later when the site is back up?
The logic behind how they arrived at that number is slightly flawed.
The logic initially applied to airline reservation systems (Sabre, etc.). Apparently, in that industry, if a customer is unable to book a flight on one system (with one alliance), many will then just book with a competitor, rather than waiting and trying again at a later time... Especially if they aren't doing this from the comfort of their home, but from a travel agent's office, and might have to come back there later to try again.
With amazon, this seems rather unlikely. People like to comparison shop, an
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So, if a website is down, and someone goes to buy something, that means they are unable to purchase it later when the site is back up?
after I got the error message I just assumed Amazon had gone out of business. it's lucky I saw this article!
I'd hate to be... (Score:1)
I'd hate to be the one developer responsible for that bug...
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The $5M figure assumes that 100% of the people that would have shopped at Amazon that hour purchased what they wanted elsewhere, rather than just trying back later, which I would bet a vast majority did.
Re:I'd hate to be... (Score:4, Informative)
Don't work. Jeff Bezos is known as a very understanding, forgiving and easy to work for boss.
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Actually, it seems it was a DDoS, as admitted by the people claiming responsibility:
we used a 7kbotnet running hoic 100 threads each. 80servers in botnet and a 16gbps booter
(From the update link in the summary: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/01/31/amazoncom-website-offline/?test=latestnews [foxnews.com])
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And you want to tell me why again ISPs can't cut off botnet infected machines and warn the customers to clean their crap before allowing them back on the net? If ISPs really cared so much about their networks as they claim they do (the reason they give for usage caps and throttling) then you would think they would want to rid themselves of useless and destructive network chatter such as infected machines. You can't tell me they can't detect a machine sending thousands of page requests a second. You can't te
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Because that 7k spread across all the different ISPs and providers represents about .0001% of each ones bandwidth. It would require far more effort and resources then you can possibly believe. Now some of the ISPs have DPI and could do it, but I'd rather they drop the DPI and just give internet access.
Call the Waaaahmbulance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds more like that was 5 million in potential dollars not earned, not 5 million lost. You can't lose what you do not yet have.
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Tell that to the RIAA and MPAA
Re:Call the Waaaahmbulance? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds more like that was 5 million in potential dollars not earned, not 5 million lost. You can't lose what you do not yet have.
I'm glad you aren't in charge of payroll.
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Because a company pays people with speculative or borrowed money does not mean that they should pay them on speculative borrowed money. Many of the financial practices we see being used today were illegal in the past. Of those that were not, taking loans to pay people was not a practice by healthy companies. It was done in desperate times sure, but today people think your crazy if you don't borrow money to pay your employees. That is beyond baffling. Not only do you pay your employee wages and taxes, b
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To the person's point, did you read Amazon.com's latest earnings report showed that the company makes about $10.8 billion per quarter, or about $118 million per day and $4.9 million per hour."
Another little point that may be of note here...
If, when those quarterly reports come out it shows that Amazon had less than $10.8 billion in costs, then they made a profit and not a loss. Sure, it may have been 4.9 million less than expected, but is was still a profit and not a loss despite what the methods of Hollywood Accounting or Bistromathematics or whatever ethically challenged system they may use shows.
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yeah, I actually missed that until I saw it pointed out. Makes the "issue" even more of a non-issue as you look at the claim in detail.
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How does that logic hold?
I lose my wallet in the street but because my income for the year is still net positive I didn't actually lose anything after all?
Don't think so - a loss is a loss even is the long term impact is just less profit.
Now - whether there was a $5M loss - that is a whole different question ;-)
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Ah, but your paycheck is money owed to you. That does not work the same way.
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You can't lose what you do not yet have.
Unless you're the RIAA/MPAA
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You can't lose what you do not yet have.
Unless you're the RIAA/MPAA
Yeah, I thought that when posting originally, but figured that goes without saying. And when something goes without saying, I don't say it (unless I am dealing with the Knights Who Until Recently Say Nee, then I will say it.)
Assumptions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon probably lost money, I'm in doubt that it's anywhere close to 5M
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it's just 49 minutes of the main gateway page of being down.
friggin useless use of the botnet.
now someone could come up with a calculation about how much it would cost to buy that amount of bots from amazons cloud.
ie, (Score:2)
Chicken feed for Amazon.
First Order Approximation (Score:2)
Interesting statistic, though that assumes that a one hour wait is sufficient to make $5 million worth of sales redirect to a competitor. Amazon has some level of brand loyalty and reputation compared to others, and I'd bet that Amazon sales are not equally distributed throughout the day.
I guess "Amazon might have suffered $5 million in losses" doesn't sound as interesting as claiming they actually did.
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Probably not $5M, but for example I bought a SSD the other day, I shopped a few sites, Amazon and Newegg were two with the best prices in particular. Newegg also had a slightly better deal on another product I wanted too, I bought the SSD and other product from them. If Amazon wasn't up I wouldn't even have had the chance to comparison shop, Online competition is fierce between the large retailers.
Ahhh (Score:1)
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to have a Sears catolog again.I could call and just place an order to a live operator..sigh.
How long did you have to wait to talk to an operator? What if a bunch of modems automatically dialed their sales number and flooded their systems?
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and to buy with januarys pricing in june... in todays world.
oops (Score:2)
There went 2013's profit!
Do you think... (Score:3, Funny)
They'll just stay open an extra hour to make up for it???
This also assumes another thing... (Score:1)
404 Error? (Score:5, Funny)
Yawn. Just waited for later (Score:1)
I was going to buy something during that period. I waited until Amazon came back, and bought it later. Problem solved. I'm not going to take my ecommerce business elsewhere because elsewhere doesn't have prime.
"the company makes about 10.8 billion per quarter" (Score:2)
In what universe?
Here's Amazon's latest financial release:
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1779049&highlight= [corporate-ir.net]
Here's the important bit:
Amazon is barely breaking even. Whether or not this is an intentional strategy is another discussion, but it sure as hell ain't making 10.8 billion a quarter. It's not even making ONE HUNDREDTH of that.
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You're suggesting that amazon, with 20b in revenue last quarter, would have made 10b if they had not invested anything in equipment/facilities? A 50% profit margin?
You can't be that stupid.
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No, he's saying that if they didn't invest their net income would not have decreased 'for now', but that because they invested in their future that net incomes may be even larger in the future, risk of the unknown aside.
Conversely you can't have been that stupid to miss what he said.
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I see you are thread-challenged. maybe you should read the post he replied to first: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3424409&cid=42756337 [slashdot.org]
An hour relative (Score:2)
One hour. That's all, they lost business for one hour, they're still up for many thousands (maybe millions) of other hours incurring the revenues consistently.
As for everyone who says "but it's so much money!" you're missing the point, absolutely no reasonable business anywhere is spending so much on just running their business that one hour of lost revenues is actually going to cause so much as a blip on their books.
Th
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People need to quit looking at whole numbers and think about this in real terms.
Ok.
One hour. That's all, they lost business for one hour, they're still up for many thousands (maybe millions) of other hours incurring the revenues consistently.
Wut? Amazon hasn't been around for multiple centuries. If we're going to talk real terms, skip the hyperbole that results from vague statements :)
Other than that, you're preaching to the choir, I'd say.
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Hackers claim credit (Score:5, Funny)
Good luck with that. First you have to pack it up in the ORIGINAL packaging, then fill out a Return For Credit form, and then wait at least 10 days for processing...
THEN maybe you can claim your credit.
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I hope they do better than I did, the cost of return mail was worth more than the book, bah.
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Not to mention, adding to the funny aspect of the claim, the group deems itself as Nazis and got reported by Fox News.
Conspiracy 101: people who believe in conspiracy theories are usually very, very, very, very, very thick people.
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Usually, then again after reading about the money market manipulation scam posted on ./ yesterday, keeping an eye out for fraud and conspirators is a good idea.
What a load of bull (Score:2)
"Amazon.com's latest earnings report showed that the company makes about $10.8 billion per quarter, or about $118 million per day and $4.9 million per hour."
No they don't, Amazon makes barely any profit at all. They do have high (and growing) revenues though.
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Net/Gross
Amazon grosses close to $5M per hour. 'Makes' is a terrible term to use because it doesn't define if your making a profit or loss.
Because I know that when I want to buy (Score:2)
something and the web site I usually shop at is temporarily down rather than trying again later I go elsewhere or don't buy it at all.
Oh shiny...
update to the update (Score:3)
calling bs on the hackers who claimed responsibility.
http://gizmodo.com/5980618/amazon-is-down [gizmodo.com]
It makes complete sense (Score:2)
They must use EC2.
Classic journalism (Score:2)
Oh, right, THAT Amazon. Thanks for avoiding any potential confusion with...well, nobody.
Re:Not just Amazon.com webservers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon has multiple data-centers. [amazon.com]
There is no one place where any specific service is hosted.
For more then one of their offerings to be down from inside, and not from the outside, it might have been something like internal routers or switch gear, or perhaps an internal route advertising accident.
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That's what I thought too.
The story was updated while I was typing the post you replied to with a suggestion they were being flooded.
But when you look at their total network capabilities, it just doesn't make sense.
Re:or maybe (Score:5, Funny)
they didn't lose that much and people decided their spatula purchase could wait a few hours
Amazon? Spatulas? Everyone knows to get your spatulas at Spatula City.
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Try the spatula hut ... better deals and salespeople who really know their stuff.
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[Random Voice #1:] Spatula City
[Random Voice #2:] Spatula City
[Announcer:]
A giant warehouse of spatulas for every occasion.
Thousands to choose from in every shape, size, and color.
And because we eliminate the middle man, we can sell all our spatulas factory direct to you.
Where do you go if you want to buy name brand spatulas at a fraction of retail cost?
[Random Voice:] Spatula City
[Random Voice:] Spatula City
[Announcer:]
And th
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Buy nine spatulas, get the tenth for just one penny!
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one click and it broke. Just one damn click....................
Signed,
Grandma's everywhere
Somewhere, hundreds of thousands of grandsons and daughters are receiving frantic phone calls informing them that the family matriarch has just broken the internets... Oh, excuse me a second, my celly's ringing...
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I dont see why this is even worth mentioning. Its a website, --
No, no. The proper comparison [xkcd.com] is with the Amazon river. When was the last time the Amazon river stopped flowing?
Round 23: Advantage: Amazon river.