Amazon.com Suffers Outage: Nearly $5M Down the Drain?

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."

Re:Hmm...

[xevioso]

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.

Re:Hmm...

[eWarz]

I happen to be IT for a large (nowhere near as large as amazon, but big enough...) eCommerce site and I can tell you, people don't buy later. A lot of those sales disappear. Users try to buy it on amazon, if that doesn't work they hit up buy.com or newegg or some other site.