Amazon.com is down…

Written on 6th June 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

A few hours ago I bought a few books in anticipation of my next holiday. I do hope they got through before the servers crashed. Yep, Amazon is down with a ‘Http/1.1 Service Unavailable’ error message:

Sometimes reloading does get you some content but then the next page you click to shows you the error message again.

UPDATE I:
Just found this interesting comment on Digg:

Amazon sells over 150,000 books a day.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day
Amazon is losing approximately two book sales every second they’re down.
A profit of $5/book would be losing $10 every second.
For every hour they’re down that would be losing $36,000.
But you figure that it is peak hours for web traffic, so I would estimate double that.
Amazon is losing approximately $72,000 per hour.
Then again I have no idea how much profit they make. But no doubt, they’re losing thousands of dollars by the minute.

Venturebeat has a post up with some details about the outage too. They say Cnet estimated that a global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute. But Amazon sites in other countries aren’t down so it is likely to be less than that. (more…)

amazon, Http/1.1, server down, Service Unavailable

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