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Comment by sroussey | Hacker News Reader

My experience over the decades is an insider dirty secret: downtime doesn’t really affect revenue.

I haven’t ever worked for a business where this was true, including AWS. I’m sure they exist, but I think your experience is an outlier

AWS has plenty of failed data retrievals, outages not mentioned or documented, and other shenanigans of the sort. It's a turn and burn operation tho where skilled folk only spend a few quarters or years before moving onto other (usually more) stable tech companies.

You can hear all about this if you turn up to Harry's at 7pm on Thursdays, or at many of the other tech events in Seattle. Lots of current and ex-Amazonians out there with stories!

I’ve worked at AWS, working with high hundreds of customers during my time there. I haven’t ever seen someone using a service with irrecoverable data loss or an inability to use a backup.

Regardless, that wasn’t my point — the outages you mention do drive customer churn and cause sales problems. Ie AWS outages do impact revenue.

Ah, seems you missed out on the funnest shenanigans inside AWS :D

These are called Fight Club issues, and are restricted access issues that don't show up for most team members. Gotta cordon off the real hairy bugs!

I've seen a aws database segfault. Most likely due to custom aws patches.

I was referencing startups by and large. If you have 100 engineers or less.

I expect AWS outages affect revenue. But on the score of the number of companies… very few are in a similar position of AWS.

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