Amazon is down ... implications for AWS? | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is down ... implications for AWS?

amazon.com

67 pointsredorb40 comments

Can you imagine being the guy or team that f'ed this up? Think how terribly nervous/stressed you'd be for the hour or so until you fixed it!? An hour would blow by in minutes as they frantically hammered on the keyboard in a terminal to see what got f'ed, just thinking that they are loosing your salary in revenue every minute or something awful. I can't imagine being an admin in that sorta situation.

$14.8 billion in revenue ~= $28,000 per minute

So an hour of downtime costs ~ $1.69 million

Very rough estimates, but could be close.

Assuming you average their revenue. But i'll betcha they make a lot of their money in spikes, so going down on a random friday evening, although costly, isn't as costly as 1.69 million. Also, what percentage of people who wanna buy something at the moment its down, won't come back later?

AWS services are all up. Just checked.

AWS status updates here:

http://status.aws.amazon.com/

on that page it says "we are having issues with aws.amazon.com" so the domain itself (including subdomains) are in trouble...

- Im predicting the https: will break soon (Currently working) as people find out that it is working ...

TC just said its been down for over an hour ...huge, huge money...

.com is back up now.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/amazon.com Still down.

https://amazon.com still works.

http://amazon.ca also works. It's only the .com that's down.

Odd... Amazon.com works fine for me, despite the downforeveryone site saying it doesn't.

To me this smells of a rollout gone terribly, terribly wrong.

My EC2 instances are all up. It's specific to Amazon's main site.

I went to a recent AWS talk by one of their evangelists, where they mentioned that AWS is separate from amazon.com, in terms of the hardware used.

It's time to put Amazon on AWS then?!?

I'm getting a HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable from here http://web-sniffer.net/?url=www.amazon.com&submit=Submit... and of course from my own PC

Something was going on yesterday I was getting error screens all over the site.

I get "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable", but if I refresh the page in my browser it comes right up. Click on a link? "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable". Weird.

Amazing how long it's been down for, I would figure this to be something that they'd work to resolve nearly immediately.

yeah, its being worked on as we speak.

"he strongest day of holiday sales for Amazon was December 10th, on which customers ordered 62.5 items pers second for a total of 5.4 million items. On its peak shipping day, the retailer shipped products internationally to more than 200 countries, moving more than 3.9 million shipments." from: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16762

- although its from the same spam article that said they sold 17 wiis a second (when they were in stock) in 2007 ...

I would say every 10 minutes cost ...

78mm for a quarter in 07, (4 months = 120 day) 78mm/120 = 650k/day = 27k/hour = $450/sec ... they are losing big would love to hear the story behind it.

If there is ever a post-mortem for this outage, I really hope it gets linked here. I'm interested to see what it could have been.

My ec2 instances are up.

It would be interesting to know what kind of failover mechanisms they follow and the reasons for the outage, and how much money they lost due to this?

Well according to returns last year, about $503/revenue per second. $15.9 billion last year.

I'm not it's accurate to give a $ revenue for second. For me personally, if I wanted to buy something and the site didn't work. I would just come back in an hour; not sure how others would change their behavior.

Oh certainly, that was just a figure. I suspect people will just come back. Still a fascinating number (btw, pulled from Reddit.com, forgot to credit originally).

I wouldn't trust that.

http://www.reddit.com/info/6mbec/comments/c049fo7

Sometimes I come to buy.com and it's closed, so I turn away and go to amazon. Eventually, I stopped going to buy.com altogether.

Unrelated, but that is exactly why those "National Don't Buy Gas Days" on Facebook don't do a thing to affect gas prices.

Because it's not a credible threat. People can't boycott indefinitely until there is a real alternative. If you don't buy gas today, you'll buy tomorrow, or next week.

S3 is still working. I don't know what's up with Amazon, but it seems to be just their storefront.

Works for me now. I wonder if the outage was related to adding the 3G iphone to their catalog?

LOL. That and the addition of the bazillion servers to cope with the sudden traffic surge the 3G iPhone will cause.

Our AWS web app (EC2 + S3) has been running fine without interruption or delay.

My question is, will a new order that I place today be properly logged...

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

It's back up.

It's back down.

Weird:

> You have been denied access to this feature because we believe you violated the terms, conditions, rules, guidelines or policies of our site in the past. If you believe we have taken this action in error, you may contact us at ad-help-us@amazon.com.

I got that too.

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