Amazon site down for 40 minutes: suggestions it cost the company $5m
The Amazon site was down in the US and Canada for 40 minutes last night, with the site completely unresponsive for the first 20 minutes.
Coming quick on the heels of Google going down for four minutes, the downage has so far been unexplained, although it has been suggested by the Puget Sound Business Journal that the site going down could have led to $4.72m in lost sales.
Sven Hammar, CEO of Apica, a provider of load testing and performance monitoring for cloud and mobile applications, said: “Amazon.com is etrade, and such a long crash is bad for brand and sales. There are a number of possible reasons for why sites crash, and I do not want to speculate on the reasons for this particular crash. But for a high-profile company like amazon.com, it must be avoided at all cost. Preparation is key.
“Generic website failures and performance problems can be minimized greatly by simply, conducting on-going testing and monitoring of the site and its applications, and having a contingency plan that includes system backup. If Amazon even can go down , so can your site.”
Apica has suggested that the incident was due to a total outage on network/datacenter level, rather than some smaller server/application problem.