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Amazon's homepage was down

199 points| nbashaw | 13 years ago |amazon.com | reply

189 comments

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[+] largehotcoffee|13 years ago|reply
Unfortunately changing the URL from http://www.amazon.com/?down=yes to http://www.amazon.com/?down=no does not appear to fix the problem.
[+] dmn001|13 years ago|reply
I'm fairly certain the OP only added that text after the link so that it would be allowed by the duplicate link filter on HN.
[+] pferate|13 years ago|reply
Funny. I followed the "down=yes" link and got the "Service unavailable" page, as expected.

Then I clicked on the "down=no" link for fun, and the page partially loaded for me. I refreshed it and got the whole front page loaded. And then one more time and got the "Service unavailable" again...

[+] unknown|13 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] evanjacobs|13 years ago|reply
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).
[+] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
That's a really interesting observation and substantiates a suspicion I've had: people generally have a good idea in mind of what they're going to buy and about when they're going to buy it. If at a particular moment the opportunity doesn't present itself, they'll simply delay the purchase until it's possible.

This would apply more to purchases from a specific and exceptional point than those which can be made from multiple providers. Say, my usual lunch spot is closed or out of an item, and I can walk down the street elsewhere (or a drugstore, etc.). However if you're selling hard-to-find exclusive items, or we've got an established relationship and the item isn't something I need right now, I'll simply get it later.

On the macro scale, it makes me suspect that shorter interruptions to service don't have a significant regional financial impact.

Though this is all armchair economics.

[+] sneak|13 years ago|reply
This is really insightful and sort of flies in the face of the research about Google's page latencies affecting search volume (even subconsciously).

Thanks for sharing a non-obvious data point.

[+] photorized|13 years ago|reply
I find this more believable than various claims about how a 10-millisecond page delay results in multimillion loss of revenue.
[+] georgemcbay|13 years ago|reply
"by nbashaw 28 minutes ago"

I thought for sure I'd have missed it and this would be one of those reports where the service was back up before the story gained traction, but as of 12:07 PM Pacific/US time I cannot navigate to Amazon's home page..

The amazing thing about this for me is that it reminds me that it was only a few years ago that even the biggest sites would have fairly frequent multi-hour outages, but these days it is pretty rare for this sort of thing to happen, particularly on a retail or otherwise direct-money generating site.

[+] adrr|13 years ago|reply
Maybe they should consider hosting in the cloud.
[+] mixedbit|13 years ago|reply
They should definitely try AWS. It is ridiculous that a simple online store manages its own infrastructure.
[+] nbashaw|13 years ago|reply
Sorry for the weird query string (?down=yes), but HN already had a amazon.com submission
[+] film42|13 years ago|reply
You beat me to it by 30 seconds.
[+] edanm|13 years ago|reply
Interesting. Never thought I'd see that.

Does anyone have statistics for Amazon homepage uptime? I don't remember the last time I heard about Amazon being down.

And an hour after I read Patrick's (patio11) article on the Rails vulnerabilities. It's a scary day indeed.

[+] dhosek|13 years ago|reply
It's actually surprising it isn't down more often—internally, everyone has write access to prod and the rule is that if you deploy something to prod you need to be able to roll it back.* Apparently, though, someone has failed on the second item.

* Or so I was told in a job interview with the big A a few years back.

[+] jasonabate|13 years ago|reply
45 minutes of downtime so far, we're seeing mostly 503 responses with an occasional 200 getting through. We've seen a few other smaller outages for amazon.com in the past but this is definitely the longest in at least the last 3-4 years. Details at http://reports.panopta.com/amazon/server/96291
[+] twistedpair|13 years ago|reply
I hope we get a nice detailed postmortem on this one.
[+] pjungwir|13 years ago|reply
Interesting for all those people chasing "five nines": If 45 minutes today is their only downtime for the year, their annual uptime for 2013 will be just

    1 - 45/(60*24*365)
or 0.99992.
[+] wikwocket|13 years ago|reply
"5 nines" works out to about 5 minutes of downtime a year: very challenging to achieve. For reference, 4 nines is about an hour, and 6 nines is only ~30 seconds of downtime a year!
[+] atlbeer|13 years ago|reply
How many $/seconds do you think the homepage being down costs?
[+] dangrossman|13 years ago|reply
Since Amazon's retail operations are unprofitable, they're actually gaining money.
[+] 7rurl|13 years ago|reply
Zero, because people who want to buy from Amazon will just try again in a few minutes/hours when it is back up.
[+] matznerd|13 years ago|reply
I just went to amazon to buy something I wanted overnight shipping on. It is down, so I am probably going to have to get it somewhere else.

On a side note, the first thing I did was google, amazon down, and saw it was (http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/amazon.com.html) then I came here, and I am proud to say, this post was #1.

[+] potatolicious|13 years ago|reply
It's January, so not much is being lost here. We're looking at the slowest shopping season of the year. My unscientific estimate based on previous experience in retail would suggest sales are probably 1/50th peak Thanksgiving/Xmas volume.

Still, downtime is money, even if it isn't a world-changing amount of it.

[+] falcolas|13 years ago|reply
Back when I worked for them (many years ago) I was told about $100,000 in lost orders per minute.
[+] smackfu|13 years ago|reply
Depends on whether people buy by going to the home page and searching, or just searching on Google.
[+] rosser|13 years ago|reply
It appears just to be the homepage, but all deep links are unauthenticated. That is: if you were logged in before the site started misbehaving, and use a deep link, you're not logged in on the page that loads.
[+] gchucky|13 years ago|reply
Per http://gizmodo.com/5980618/amazon-is-down, a hacker group named Nazi Gods has claimed responsibility for the downtime.
[+] RyJones|13 years ago|reply
I've read the trouble ticket for this. It had absolutely nothing to do with hackers.
[+] k2xl|13 years ago|reply
Maybe they forgot to pay their EC2 bill
[+] dm8|13 years ago|reply
It's up now! But it's strange that they were down. And don't they run on AWS themselves?
[+] ultimoo|13 years ago|reply
I remember being in a talk by Dr. Vogels last year and he mentioning that *most of the Amazon.com North America services moved over to AWS in September 2011, many other services outside of NA were yet to move.
[+] ceejayoz|13 years ago|reply
Running on AWS doesn't protect you from problems in the applications you're running on AWS. You can `rm -rf /` an EC2 instance and have plenty of problems.
[+] alexakarpov|13 years ago|reply
not 100%, but more and more teams are moving over; it's a goal that's pursued aggressively, but not reached yet.
[+] dtwhitney|13 years ago|reply
I've been having odd behavior with DynamoDB all day. I wonder if it's related. The AWS Health Dashboard says things are fine, but I'm not so sure: http://status.aws.amazon.com/
[+] jeffbarr|13 years ago|reply
Have you reported your issues in the Forum or via the "Report an Issue" page?
[+] setheron|13 years ago|reply
JeffB is for sure getting paged.
[+] druiid|13 years ago|reply
Been a while since I've seen the amazon homepage down. Wow.

I know from the e-commerce side, when walmart.com went down last year we saw a traffic increase (enough to actually link to to the outage for walmart). I wonder if it'll happen here.