ET Amazon.com crashed and was unavailable for all users for approx. 40 minutes. No explanation has yet been given by Amazon.com for the unresponsiveness of the site.

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The initial 20 minutes were totally unresponsive. After that basic server 503 error appeared, so the incident was more likely due to a total outage on network / datacenter level, rather than some smaller server/application problem.

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Analytics firm GoSquared reported the fault caused a 40% dip in worldwide internet traffic. Google has not explained the cause.

According to the Puget Sound Business Journal estimates, at 40 minutes, the outage could have cost the company as much as $4.72 million in lost sales. This is based on the company’s average sales of $117,882 per minute. 

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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.”

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