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Amazon's homepage was down
- nbashaw 14y agoSorry for the weird query string (?down=yes), but HN already had a amazon.com submission
- film42 14y agoYou beat me to it by 30 seconds.
- peterkelly 14y agoI was 400ms too late :(
- mkopinsky 14y agoOr he was 400ms too early...
- jpsim 14y agoThankfully, it looks like all of AWS is still up. http://status.aws.amazon.com/ http://status.aws.amazon.com/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- danvideo 14y agoit looks like just homepage all the internal links seem to be working fine http://www.amazon.com/gp/site-directory/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/site-directory/ edit: added less ugly link
- nbashaw 14y agoGood catch - title updated accordingly
- setheron 14y agoJeffB is for sure getting paged.
- notdonspaulding 14y agoWhat's the guess as to how much revenue Amazon loses for every second of downtime?
- setheron 14y agoI was told varying different numbers at the time I joined. I'd be curious to know as well.
- dm8 14y agoGiven their annual revenues of $60B and they were down for ~ 20-25 minutes. So they must have lost ~$3M in revenues during entire downtime. P.S. Wild guess. No idea about how much sale do they make during peak hours.
- runarb 14y agoNot all abandon sales are a loss for Amazon. Many customers will simply just com back and buy another day because they don't know about the competition.
- atlbeer 14y agoHow many $/seconds do you think the homepage being down costs?
- dangrossman 14y agoSince Amazon's retail operations are unprofitable, they're actually gaining money.
- dbaupp 14y agoIs this seriously true?? (If so, where do they make their money?)
- cjbprime 14y agohttp://kottke.org/13/01/amazon-is-a-charity-run-by-the-investment-community http://kottke.org/13/01/amazon-is-a-charity-run-by-the-inves...
- Deinos 14y agoVolume, volume, volume!
- wpietri 14y agoThey are optimizing for market share and innovation rather than profits. It's a world domination thing. I think it's awesome. Imagine if Google had run a bunch of low-rent punch-the-monkey display ads early on. It would have killed them. Facebook vs MySpace is another good example of what happens when you focus on long-term value creation versus short-term profit taking.
- davej 14y agoBack up @ 19:46 GMT.
- edanm 14y agoInteresting. 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 14y agoIt'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.
- georgemcbay 14y agoI find this extremely hard to believe. (Not calling you a liar, but I think something must have gotten lost in translation). The possibility for theft and fraud would be so massive if every dev at Amazon had write access to production that I find it nearly impossible to believe this is true.
- Firehed 14y agoI imagine he means the ability to deploy code to prod at will, not full access to their database.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoDoes the code you deploy have access to the database?
- aphexairlines 14y agoNo.
- dsl 14y ago
- largehotcoffee 14y agoUnfortunately changing the URL from http://www.amazon.com/?down=yes http://www.amazon.com/?down=yes to http://www.amazon.com/?down=no http://www.amazon.com/?down=no does not appear to fix the problem.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- up_and_up 14y agoThis seems to be working for me: http://www.amazon.com/?is_it_jeff=yes http://www.amazon.com/?is_it_jeff=yes
- mhurron 14y agoWhat the hell?
- nbashaw 14y agoLooks like it's back up
- amitlan 14y agoit is up.
- HelloMcFly 14y agoNot for me (America).
- shardling 14y agoUp for me (Kentucky)
- cm2012 14y agoHah, we're losing $3 a minute from lost sales while they're down - the travesty!
- thechut 14y agoBackup for US EAST at 14:58
- druiid 14y agoBeen 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.
- kno 14y agoToday's deals works fine http://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox/ref=cs_top_nav_gb27 http://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox/ref=cs_top_nav_gb27
- jerhewet 14y ago> ping ec2.amazonaws.com
- reefoctopus 14y agoWell this explains some things I had to deal with this morning. Apparently some people had issues with EC2 as well.
- k2xl 14y agomore detail: http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/amazon.com.html http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/amazon.com.html
- gesman 14y agoThe beginning of the end of the world!
- adrr 14y agoMaybe they should consider hosting in the cloud.
- JohnFromBuffalo 14y agoI hear this grid-computing stuff is pretty capable. distributed applications are the future! Anyone want to pay me for time-share on my VAX?
- mixedbit 14y agoThey should definitely try AWS. It is ridiculous that a simple online store manages its own infrastructure.
- hayksaakian 14y agoAWS was actually UP all this time, so perhaps that's not a bad suggestion.
- thspimpolds 14y agoWow. You really don't know why AWS exists. AWS is Amazon.com. http://www.zdnet.com/how-amazon-exposed-its-guts-the-history-of-awss-ec2-3040155310/ http://www.zdnet.com/how-amazon-exposed-its-guts-the-history... As for why, it's easy. Taxes. Much like Walmart rents its stores form an LLC it owns to write off the taxes and bring down the liability of the largest revenue sector, Amazon can write off their server costs since they can "rent" them from AWS LLC. While AWS makes a good chunk of change, it has nothing on amazon.com so by making AWS its own entity (and event better for them that its publicly available) they get a gigantic tax write off and AWS makes capex expenditures saving them taxes. All In all, the shell game must save amazon millions just like it does for Walmart
- _frog 14y agoI think you might have missed a joke there.
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- dm8 14y agoIt's up now! But it's strange that they were down. And don't they run on AWS themselves?
- alexakarpov 14y agonot 100%, but more and more teams are moving over; it's a goal that's pursued aggressively, but not reached yet.
- ceejayoz 14y agoRunning 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.
- ultimoo 14y agoI 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.
- trimbo 14y agoBut... I can't read my front page letter from Jeff?
- k2xl 14y agoMaybe they forgot to pay their EC2 bill
- creativityhurts 14y agoIt's still down http://cl.ly/MZNo http://cl.ly/MZNo
- gohwell 14y agoI wonder how many millions they've lost
- rosser 14y agoIt 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.
- georgemcbay 14y ago"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.
- dguaraglia 14y ago12:18 PST, still down. Someone must be getting his ass chewed about this.
- garretruh 14y agoFired is more like it. Though I doubt Jeff Bezos is the kind of guy to do something like that.
- cl8ton 14y ago12:22 PST still down... Looking for Mushroom cloud to the NW
- farnsworth 14y ago12:26 PST and no problems accessing from Seattle.
- bink-lynch 14y ago12:34 PST and OK from Vegas.
- potatolicious 14y agoI used to work for Amazon. Unless this was willful I doubt anyone is going to get fired for it. After all, you'd be firing the guy who's least likely to make such a mistake ever again.
- ForFreedom 14y agoApart from it being down all hits from hackers are bound to just create load on the server. :)
- lucb1e 14y agoMy server with an Intel Atom, Windows 7, and 100KB/s upload connection didn't go down from reaching the Hacker News homepage. It's laughable that any other website does. For Amazon, traffic from sites like Hackernews must be completely negligible.
- noname123 14y agohttp://aws.amazon.com/console/ http://aws.amazon.com/console/ and aws is still up.
- jerhewet 14y ago> ping ec2.amazonaws.com
- joetek 14y ago... 35 minutes and anonymous hasn't claimed responsibility yet?
- alexakarpov 14y agoof course they did: http://gizmodo.com/5980618/amazon-is-down http://gizmodo.com/5980618/amazon-is-down bogus, I can assure you
- Posibyte 14y agoStill down at 2:00 PM CST. I hope we see a good post-mortem out of this. For their record amounts of uptime, I can only expect something extreme.
- officemonkey 14y agoStill down at 1423 CST.
- officemonkey 14y agoHowever, I just reloaded and it loaded back up nice and pretty.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dfriedmn 14y agoFree month of Thinkful to the team that's supposed to be keeping it up. Could have order something and had it delivered in the time it took to get back up...
- dtwhitney 14y agoI'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/ http://status.aws.amazon.com/
- jeffbarr 14y agoHave you reported your issues in the Forum or via the "Report an Issue" page?
- blambeau 14y agoIs Amazon running Rails or Rubygems?
- dsl 14y agoThe blessed languages of Amazon are C++, Java, and Perl.
- alexakarpov 14y agoRuby is replacing Perl, and that's been going on for a few years now (and we have a pretty active RoR community).
- aioprisan 14y agostats?
- alexakarpov 14y agonot sure what kind of statistics would be good and not violate the NDA =) but our internal rubyhackers mailing list is one of the busiest lists that I'm on. I myself am not a Ruby fan, so don't know any details.
- bowyakka 14y agoGood thing that hacker news is their first port of call for monitoring then !
- pjungwir 14y agoInteresting 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.
- trebor 14y agoIt's up on the east coast, but that was almost 50 minutes of downtime. (I heard that they make $100,000/minute...)
- runarb 14y agoBack up her in Norway also.
- gwf 14y agoI managed to clip the isitdownrightnow.com status while it was down: http://clipboard.com/clip/LQOyBd-lpIMCZzlmvYHqted7GrrQ3zkJisue http://clipboard.com/clip/LQOyBd-lpIMCZzlmvYHqted7GrrQ3zkJis...
- gchucky 14y agoPer http://gizmodo.com/5980618/amazon-is-down http://gizmodo.com/5980618/amazon-is-down, a hacker group named Nazi Gods has claimed responsibility for the downtime.
- dsl 14y agoThey are just trolling. Wait for something to go down on its own then spin it. These twitter gems demonstrate the cluelessness of the "hackers": https://twitter.com/NaziGods/status/297074050881183744 https://twitter.com/NaziGods/status/297074050881183744 https://twitter.com/NaziGods/status/297070145141104641 https://twitter.com/NaziGods/status/297070145141104641
- RyJones 14y agoI've read the trouble ticket for this. It had absolutely nothing to do with hackers.
- wglb 14y agoNo, it is not. Don't post outages here.
- ivanb 14y agoOH MY GOD
- evanjacobs 14y agoDuring 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 14y agoThat'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.
- ZeroMinx 14y ago> people generally have a good idea in mind of what they're going to buy If I may, could I suggest another possibility; People know, and trust, Amazon. "I can't load the shopping site. Maybe it'll work if I reboot." It's quite different for a site that's not as well known as this one.
- robryan 14y agoDefinitely, we can make sales numbers riding on the back of their reputation in the marketplace on amazon that we can get nowhere near with website sales in the US market. From a customer standpoint their a-z guarantee probably helps a lot.
- khangtoh 14y agoThe really interesting thing that really happened was Techcrunch's reporting of this news worthy event. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/amazon-com-down-503-service-unavailable/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/amazon-com-down-503-service... It's sad that "tech" bloggers don't research and report on news worthy things anymore, they just take what's on Hacker News and call it news.
- zbowling 14y agoTraditional news does with the AP and Reuters news wires. Hacker News is a newswire of the tech world.
- robryan 14y agoMakes sense, you are one reporter with little more information than everyone else before you know what the story is. Of course the thousands of people on HN are going to beat you to a story like this.
- st3fan 14y agoOH NO I MISSED THIS IMPORTANT EVENT!? Why does this post have 168 points?
- philwelch 14y agoCue HN admin changing submission title to "Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more" in 3...2...1... (cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5142851 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5142851)
- lucb1e 14y agoLess cynicism on HN might be a good thing, too.
- stcredzero 14y agoI'm going read that as ironic. (Or, did I write that...?)
- lucb1e 14y agoAny news on what happened?