What Was Up With All Those Amazon Outages?

Sometimes, consumers just don’t know what they got ’til it’s gone. And while Amazon draws its fair share of complaints from the wider market, those customers’ reactions when Amazon goes down is a whole lot more telling than the inverse.

Go down Amazon did, though. At about 2:25 p.m. ET on Thursday (March 10), CNBC reported, consumers started putting the word out on Twitter that access to Amazon’s desktop and mobile sites and app was down. Though the outage lasted approximately 20 minutes, it was still enough time for consumers to flood social media with reactions and rants. With the exception of a single tweet from Amazon’s Spanish-language helpdesk clarifying to a customer that they were working on the problem, the retailer kept mum.

Oddly enough, the outage appears to have only affected Amazon‘s eCommerce site. All services and clients related to Amazon Web Services reported no disruptions to service, which stands in stark contrast to Sept. 2015 when an AWS outage led to spotty access for Netflix, Tinder and Airbnb. The Register reported that last year’s incident was caused by data faults at its northern Virginia cloud storage facility dubbed “US-EAST-1,” though no such information is available about today’s 404.

For any other company, detecting, identifying and then fixing an outage in the space of 20 minutes would be a triumph of systems administrations. However, every second that Amazon’s site spends down is potentially millions of dollars in lost sales. VentureBeat explained that a 2013 outage that lasted about 40 minutes cost Amazon roughly $5 million. Since it’s fair to say that Amazon’s sales have grown in the intervening years, an outage of half that duration in 2016 could very well end up costing Amazon into the double-digit millions.

Fortunately, for the company, Amazon has so many new projects going on outside of its website that an outage today might not hurt its business as much as years’ past.