Website Outage Costs Amazon.com Dearly

By Greg McNevin

June 9, 2008: An outage experienced by the world’s foremost online retailer has highlighted the drastic impact some server downtime can have on business, with the company potentially losing upwards of US$1.8 (AU$1.88) million during over 2 hours.

The site went down around 1:30 in the afternoon EDT on Friday, and based on an Ad Age estimate that the e-commerce site will rake in almost US$4 (AU$4.17) billion during the 91 days of Q2 this year, the two or so hours of reported downtime could cost the firm dearly.

The online retailer’s US site was the only one affected, and as Amazon is yet to make a statement about the outage it’s hard to know exactly how much the downtime will actually cost it.

However, considering the company is pushing new cloud computing and online storage services, such a large chunk of downtime is a bit of a blow to its reputation.

Especially considering the sheer length of the downtime. A few minutes, let alone a few hours is virtually unheard of for today’s top-end enterprise websites.

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