Amazon Was Down

The interweb is all atwitter: Amazon.com site fails for 2 hours, cause unknown.

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc said its U.S. website was down for about 2 hours on Friday but said it was unsure what had blocked access to the world's biggest online store.

An Amazon spokeswoman said the site was unavailable for a couple of hours starting at around 10:25 a.m. California time (1725 GMT). Web monitoring company Keynote put the outage at 2-1/2 hours and said the site was fully back up just before 1 p.m. in California (2000 GMT).

Users in the United States who tried signing onto the popular portal during the outage saw a message saying the service was unavailable. It urged shoppers who were making purchases when it went down to check back later to see if the sales had been properly rung up.

While the cause of the outage remained unclear as of Friday afternoon, one expert said it was likely due to the sheer complexity of the site, which tailors content to visitors depending on factors such as their location, purchase history and behavior during previous visits.

What's the financial impact of that downtime?

Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute. (To be fair, those figures don't include revenue from other sources such as search or contextual advertisements or Amazon Web Services.)

Help them recover by buying something.