[Woden501]

You ask that about Facebook and thanks to the recent outage we can already see that YES Facebook is having a significant impact on traffic to non-Facebook news sites. When Facebook went down earlier this month there was a 40% spike in traffic to news sites during the outage.

Now imagine a company that has been just as effective as Facebook at replacing/consuming/killing it's competition in the retail space and you've got Amazon. If Amazon went down for a proportional extended period, say for a few days, you'd likely see a massive spike in sales at other retailers just as we saw a massive spike in new site traffic when Facebook was down.