Amazon was down | Hacker News Reader

Amazon was down

amazon.com

67 pointsjemhoff61 comments

The title now says "Amazon was down" but I'm still getting "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable"

I removed the querystring from the URL and then it worked for me.

I did as well, and still got the error. I'm now getting the home page, but that doesn't necessarily mean the site's fully back up.

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable for me. Almost an hour later.

Some folks at Amazon are having a really bad day right now.

I suspect they are having a busy day right now, tomorrow will be the bad day :).

It's spontaneously up for me, sometimes I get a homepage, most of the time I get Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.

Seeing the same, probably depends which front-end server the load balancers route you to.

spontaneously?

intermittently

Sporadically.

I wonder how many millions are lost per minute of downtime.

Revenue lost? Revenue briefly deferred? Profit lost? Profit briefly deferred?

Those are four very different numbers.

I was thinking revenue lost.

I recall someone claiming to be an amazon developer one of the previous times when this happened claiming that they don't actually lose that much money. (sorry no link, my google-fu has failed me). A small number of orders where people are desperate are lost, but the vast majority of people generally just wait it out and make their order tomorrow instead.

10 years ago we calculated downtime at $100k/minute for the homepage. So when you tried to do an ajaxy thing on the home page and messed it up, even after testing, you had to write an email that calculated how much theoretical money was lost.

And sure, there's some elasticity, but an approximation is handy.

I, honestly, doubt very much. I'm sure you'll have a percentage of potential customers not make a purchase at all because the site is down, but everyone that is committed to buying whatever it was they were going to look for will just wait until the site is back up.

I don't recall the source, but I've seen that the loss due to downtime is negligible, and that customers return at a later time to complete their purchase.

I'd agree for people who are buying stuff they need or otherwise are making considered purchases. I don't believe that they don't lose at least some amount of impulse purchases.

I'd suspect not a lot. The number that gets tossed around is based on the whole year's sales divided by downtime - but that fails to account for seasonality.

The retail market in the USA can be accurately summarized as "slow trickle slow trickle slow trickle slow trickle MASSIVE DELUGE OMG OMG slow trickle slow trickle..."

It would shock people how much consumer spending is shoved into the November-December time frame. Since this downtime is in the middle of May, I don't expect them to lose much money at all.

Also, a lot of the "lost" orders during the down time will actually just be delayed. I imagine most people will just try to place their order again tomorrow

That depends too. I suspect at this time of year it's true - during the holidays I wouldn't bank on it. When people are gift shopping downtime easily means the difference between a sale and the customer jumping in their car and running down to the Toys 'R Us.

Downtime is a Big Deal during the high retail season, and not really a big deal outside of it.

All other Amazon sites (.co.uk, .fr, .de, etc.) are up.

Who changed this to "was down"? (After 23 minutes) it still is 90% down on reload (for me).

This seems to be working:

http://www.amazon.com/?is_it_jeff=1

Tried buying something just now, errored out.

At least AWS is still up!

It's usually the reverse... AWS goes down but Amazon carries on quite happily

> AWS goes down but Amazon carries on quite happily

Usually more like “isolated parts of AWS go down and people who didn't follow Amazon's deployment guidelines complain”

I wonder whether Wall Street will feel this or not.

"Http/1.1 Service Unavailable"

Proxy down?

Whoops, forgot to check nginx.conf didn't have any syntax errors before restarting!

Just blew the minds of everyone I work with.

Still up for me at 3PM, Northwest UK.

Looks like it's back up now.

It's alive now.

Not for me

they should get some better web hosting!

they should try this new aws thing everyone is talking about!

nah man ... they should move away from HostGator and go to Linode! I've heard real nice things about Linode

Whenever something like this happens I always think it was my fault because I just ordered a tube of toothpaste.

's/think/hope/g'

:%s/think/hope/g

Vim? real programmers use sed.

Real programmers use a magnatized needle and a steady hand

classic

http://xkcd.com/378/ :)

Good ol' C-x M-c M-xkcd

Thanks! I didn't understand the magnetized needle joke at first :)

Edit: Downvoted? Really? For showing appreciation for a link?

:s/think/hope/

It's one line of text.

It's not the order itself, its just that hit the submit button too many times.

What happening to Amazon? #wtf

its not down. They are just experiencing api slowness... chill!

It's definitely down

you apparently have never been to the aws status page.

We are talking about Amazon.com, not AWS. They are completely independent services

Amazon.com does run on EC2. You can bet that if EC2 had a a complete regional outage (which is extremely rare) Amazon.com would be down.

In general Amazon.com makes extensive use of AWS services internally as well, but it's very well architected to handle service outages without it being immediately obvious to the end user.

Amazon.com doesn't run on EC2.

I understand this wasn't a general AWS outage, AWS !== amazon.com, and that successful hosting in EC2 requires specific architectural decisions to make things run reliably in face of zone/region outages.

What i didn't realize was that jokes about Amazon being somewhat slow and cryptic with information about outages while they're happening were off-limits.

you apparently can't read

Also while it was 'definitely down' I placed an order so I'm not sure what your version of down is.

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