Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins

techcrunch.com

45 pointsDK00715 comments

Using very naïve calculations, it looks like they lost up to $5 million in revenue because of this.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Amazon.com%27s+annua...

(This ignores a lot of important factors: not all pages being down, it happening in peak US hours, not accounting for the uninterrupted AWS revenue, having to purchase new hardware, damaged brand, etc)

A former Amazon.com engineer in the other discussion thread has indicated that Amazon never seemed to lose revenue during these outages.

>During my time as an engineer working on Amazon.com, we occasionally experienced outages of various lengths. One of the surprising details about these outages is that they really didn't result in any revenue loss. That is, it appeared that customers would simply wait until the website was available again to make their purchase. I would be surprised if that effect doesn't still happen today especially with the availability of Amazon on a variety of platforms (i.e. customers are comfortable ordering from their phones when they couldn't get to the website from their desktop computers).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461

Not to mention, it's free PR. I'd forgotten I needed to order some stuff, but this reminded me, and so I placed the order once they were back up. I'm not sure how common that reaction is, but it might offset the downtime to some extent.

This almost makes me wonder whether a startup should identify easily-fixed weak points in its architecture and work on the fix so that it's ready to go, but don't deploy it. When the weak point eventually fails, rush to deploy the ready-made fix and then include a wonderful technical post-mortem of what happened, how you overcame an architectural weakness, and post it on High Scalability and submit it to HN. Small downtime; big PR boost.

A fine idea for a one or two man shop but if with a larger organization you then have a conspiracy. If word leaks could cause some major issues (along with more publicity).

It's not free if they lost millions of dollars in the process. The % of people in your situation is probably less than 1, so the net is still a loss.

I bet that kid that went to jail for DDOSing Amazon back in the day would've liked to have this engineer's comment for his defence when they claimed he did 'millions' in damages

Exactly. An outage in the homepage once every X years won't result in lost revenue, you'll just login an hour later coz you have already settled in buying from amazon for 100 other reasons. An outage every day on the other hand...Totally different story, you start feeling inconvenience and end up somewhere else.

I've heard this sort of thing from other places, too. For example, independent software developers who run their own stores also observe that their revenue will wait out outages that aren't excessively long.

But less than 4k in profit....wow those are some thin margins overall.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Amazon+profit%2F+%28...

Mitigating factors include:

  This is a very low time of the year for commerce.

  A certain (fairly large?) percentage of potential customers will simply return later in the day to make their purchases.

Funny anecdote:

I checked out Twitter for the first time in a while to see if anyone was talking about the Amazon outage. I ran a search for "Amazon", and one of the tweets I saw was Scott Hanselman linking to his review of the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, which included a review of the Kindle Cover. The review was pretty convincing, so I ended up buying the cover yesterday night.

So in a way, Amazon's outage yesterday directly resulted in me ordering a $35 product from Amazon.

This probably (inconclusively of course) confirms what other people are saying here - I'm not surprised that Amazon gets some free PR from this mess, which earns evens out any potential lost revenue.

For a potential reason why this might not make any difference to Amazons revenue/sales/whatever one should read this gem of a past by John Allspaw (Ops whiz kid for those who have no idea who he is) :: http://www.kitchensoap.com/2013/01/03/availability-nuance-as...

> Site outages are never good things but feel particularly shaky when they are linked to e-commerce sites or other places where user data is stored.

Or, you know, when we've trusted the affected company in turn to run the infrastructure for so many of our businesses.

I'm not sure if it was related but Amazon wouldn't let me rent a movie tonight... Tried on multiple platforms (directly from PS3, website) Not cool!

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