I can't imagine that's a real loss, likely only deferred sales. What are you going to do if you can't buy your thing at Amazon? Drive somewhere? I think you'll try again later.

Dividing income for time doesn't necessarily give you loss, especially this seems to have no weighting for time of day and season. I doubt an outage right now has anywhere near the same effect it would have during lunch break two weeks before Christmas.

Heroku is up: http://cl.ly/image/0B0U1K3Z342R.

Conversely, when AWS had issues, Amazon.com was not impacted.

Amazon.com != AWS. I'm curious to know when AWS or Amazon.com innovations impact each other, or which one leads. I'd rather it be Amazon.com.

I think the gp was saying that the brand— as in, the perception of AWS— will suffer, not the actual services.

Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep a website up for 100% of the time, so downtime at Amazon is understandable, but maybe the average Joe Manager is deciding between Rackspace and AWS and happens to visit amazon.com during this downtime. "If Amazon can't even keep their bread-and-butter running, how can I trust them with something like AWS?" he might say.

> Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep a website up for 100% of the time

As far as I know Google has 100% uptime, so it's not impossible. May not be 100% for every geographical location but that's partly because of things Google cannot control nor make redundant.

Even if Amazon.com != AWS, it is still bad for the Amazon Brand which encompasses AWS.

If they can't keep their own server up, how can you trust them with yours?

An unfair argument, perhaps, but one that impacts them all the same.

Apparently, Amazon.com switched to AWS in 2011 http://www.quora.com/Amazon/Does-Amazon-com-use-Amazon-AWS.

I was at the AWS Summit in NYC last week and Werner claims that they only completed the transition of retail to AWS fairly recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo1W92Teqx4

Does Amazon really go down that often? Is there any data how often/ for how long Amazon does go down? I wonder how it compares to other sites that get the same amount of traffic.

I think it's the second time this year - http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/31/technology/amazon-down/index...

It probably doesn't, but you notice every time it does.

It went down once in the last couple weeks as well, if I remember right.

FWIW, I did not notice that.

It does not go down that often, and when it does its measured in minutes. This latest outage was maybe ~10 minutes total...

Is it a real cost (and how can you know that?) or just a naive interpolation sales_per_hour / hours_outage?

Most of those are surely done later, perhaps they lose some impulsive buys though.

$31K in '08. What is it today?

A very quick calculation (using AMZN's $61b net sales in 2012) yields about $116k per minute.

One thing that would contribute to extra cost is a large amount of advertising that they are paying per click that ends up leading to a page being down.

Amazon.com retail website does not run on AWS.

Amazon.com website actually runs on AWS for last 2-3 years.

It sure didn't when I was there three years ago, but maybe they moved quickly.

Not true...

It runs 100% on AWS.

Not all of amazon runs on AWS though, since they use a service oriented architecture, but many of the services also run on AWS.

Judging from alpb's post, they either currently work there, or did in the past. "retail website" being the key phrase used frequently internally to Amazon.