Amazon.com, the main retail page of the Seattle, Wash.-based company, suffered an outage that left millions of users unable to access the site.
The retail giant’s main U.S. site went offline at approximately 3 p.m. ET on Monday. The cause of the outage remains unclear, but Amazon Web Services (AWS), including EC2, remained up and working on the most part unaffected, according to its status page.
However, after we first published this post, at 3:14 p.m. ET, the AWS Management Console was experiencing elevated error rates across all regions of the world, including North America and Europe. There was also a flagged issue with a North Virginia data center that was quickly resolved…
Amazon receives approximately 77 million people visiting from the U.S. per day, and is one of the top ten websites in the world in terms of traffic. It’s not clear how much revenue Amazon may lose as a result of the outage. One report estimates it to be in the region of more than $1,100 in net sales per second.
Google’s five minute outage last week is said to have cost the search giant more than $545,000.
Affected sites were restored about 25 minutes later.
read more at ZDNet
The NYT, Amazon, Google. Interesting to note that disrupting commerce was also the direct fallout of the bombings of the World Trade Towers on 9-11. The disruption of commerce without murdering anyone appears a new fillip in doing harm to jobs and wares, suppliers and shareholders.
A bigger worry aside from all ‘the cloud storage’ of commerce is that nuclear plants, utilities that provide heat in winter, water supplies via water companies, sewage control, the movement of vast food stores, and many more aspects of human life on ‘the grid’ including surveillance of many kinds for security’s sake are computerized.
There’s an oddity about sabotage by computer plastics vs actual plastic explosives. Were there a terrible storm in winter that brought down electrical lines, the infernal cell towers, clogging the streets so ambulances could not get through, people would pour into the streets shoveling snow, carrying people to the hospital on their backs, delivering babies in the cabs of snowplows, holding shelter together somehow. But when there is serious sabotage of communications, commerce, utilities and more… the people may not know how to rally with one another. May wait like moles to be told what to do. May perish because of not knowing what to do if there is no cell phone, no landline, no electricity, no broadband, no draw bridges operant, no water in the faucets, no food arriving on store shelves, no elaborate traffic and trucking and shipping lanes operant, air traffic control contorted…
And then what? Given we were told in a complete parody of Ianesco absurdity by ‘homeland security’ to use duct tape and black garbage bags to cover our windows… in case, you know, terrorists might suddenly fly through our lit windows in winter’s dusk… one wonders what our homeland protection service advises about purposeful life-threatening sabotage to utilities and communications for the populace… during winter.
One cant predict all floods, hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, earthquakes. But one can surely anticipate that predators show up wherever there is beauty or order or many human lives at stake.
I wonder if our government knows this too, and is fully on offensive.
Or whether ‘homeland security’ and other security agencies wait… and only react late, and defensively.