Big e-commerce website outage = big-time $$ losses | The Amazon case study

When your business is online, being temporarily 'closed for business' is NOT good.
Amazon suffered a service outage in the US on Friday, for a little over an hour and a half. Amazon hadn’t had a big outage for a while...




According to a calculation by CNET, this has resulted in a theoretical loss of about $3 million ($31,000 per minute). Ouch...

(Apparently, the outage did not affect International websites and Amazon Web Services.)

It's Amazon, but still, this is a nice reminder to set your e-commerce business up with a reliable and redundant hosting infrastructure from the get-go. Once your website is live, there's no closing hours. Your shop is open 24/7, and customers flock at all times, day and night :)

Techcrunch's take:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/06/amazon-down-not-answering-calls/

CNET's take:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html

Mashable's take:
http://mashable.com/2008/06/06/amazon-is-down/

No official Amazon news release yet.