Amazon.com went down and the world panicked
By Jonathan Schlaffer
It’s true that for a short time today super-web seller Amazon.com was down and the community panicked. Why? There are those who want to analyze the financial impact of this and that’s fine, I am sure that Amazon did lose some sales during the outage. It’s not clear how long the outage lasted but I put it around two hours or so and it’s already getting blown out of proportion.
From the looks of things it would be easy to think that Amazon had been down for days. MarketWatch is already reporting the impact of the outage. Shares of Amazon went down 2.7% and the company was not available for comment.
Okay, so that’s a bad thing. I can understand why they may not immediately want to comment on an outage that prevent people from buying items on their site. I wanted to buy something and couldn’t do it. Would I have written a post about it? No, it’s not news, sites go down, they come back up, this is a fact of life.
However, other sites have seen fit to report this as news and this is currently one of the top stories over at Digg. I am trying to figure out why.
Remember the line from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t Panic,” well, don’t panic. It’s just a website and very likely what you can’t buy this very minute can be bought in the next minute, next hour or the next day.
If you can’t access the site, neither can the next guy so whatever you wanted, if it is a popular item, won’t sell out during the outage.
It is my opinion that Amazon.com being down for a duration for a couple of hours in the grand scheme of things is not such a big deal.
I can’t say this for certain but if that’s the first time it’s gone down this year and if that’s the only time it goes down this year, then that in my book is one excellent track record.
Two hours out of 365 days. Now, I’m off to find some real news, or at least something that’s more worthy. What’s wrong with you people? Seriously? It’s really too bad that for a couple hours it wasn’t possible to buy the latest fad, deal with it.
And yes, Amazon.com is now back up so get out one of those 50 credit cards and buy, buy, buy!
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June 6th, 2008
The reason is it news is that Amazon is so huge and such a thing is unheard of for them. This sort of outage is not even a once in a year thing, and you’d likely have to go back quite a few years to find a similar outage.
The only online presence that would make a bigger impression on me by being offline for more than an hour would be Google, in which case I’d probably assume the rapture is in process.