So I was in the middle of buying a $19 phone case at like 12:40 today when the page just... stopped. Spinner going nowhere. Refreshed it, got a blank white screen, refreshed again and got the "sorry, something went wrong on our end" page. My first thought, not gonna lie, was "oh great, did someone hack Amazon," because after the week we just had with the Syrian Electronic Army knocking over the New York Times and a bunch of other big sites through their domain registrar, that's just where my brain goes now. Turns out it wasn't that. Amazon.com just fell over on its own, for something like 30 to 40 minutes, and took a decent chunk of the rest of the internet with it since so much stuff quietly runs on AWS infrastructure behind the scenes.
I did the dumb thing everyone does, which is do napkin math on how much money that costs them. Amazon doesn't publish per-minute revenue, but if you take their last quarterly numbers and divide it out you land somewhere around $66,000 a minute, give or take. Forty minutes of that is real money, like "buy a house in most of the country" money, and that's before you count whatever fraction of people just gave up and bought the thing somewhere else instead of coming back later. I did not go buy my phone case somewhere else, for the record. I just closed the tab and looked at Twitter, where half my feed was people posting screenshots of the error page like it was a rare Pokemon.
This is the second time in a week I've noticed something like this. A few days ago, Friday I think, Google went down for everybody, all of it, Search and Gmail and Drive, for something like one to five minutes depending who you ask, and somebody at a traffic-analytics company put out a chart showing global internet traffic dropping by around 40% in that window. Forty percent! For a five minute blip! That number stuck with me way more than the Amazon thing honestly, because it's such a clean illustration of how much of what we call "the internet" is really just two or three companies' server rooms having a good day.
I don't think people talk about this enough, the sheer concentration of it. We used to talk about "the cloud" like it was some ambient weather system, but it's a couple of buildings in Virginia and Oregon with generators in the basement, and when the wrong disk array hiccups, checkout carts across a huge swath of the retail internet just stop. I'm not saying this to be alarmist, I just think it's a little wild that we built so much of daily commerce and communication on top of infrastructure most of us couldn't point to on a map. My uncle, who still prints out his boarding passes at the library because he doesn't trust "the phone thing," would have a field day with this if I told him. I'm not going to tell him.
Also — small unrelated complaint while I'm here — can we talk about how every single device I own now needs a slightly different USB cable? I've got a drawer in my kitchen that's just a nest of micro-USB, mini-USB, and the weird proprietary Kindle one, and half of them don't even charge anything anymore, they're just fossils. I keep meaning to throw them out and I never do because what if I need the exact one shaped like that someday. Anyway.
Back to Amazon: they came back up smooth, no apology email that I saw, no big statement, just quietly working again like nothing happened, which is honestly the most Amazon response possible. I went back and bought the phone case about an hour later. Cost me $19.99 plus tax, and Prime shipping means it'll be here Wednesday regardless of the fact that their whole storefront face-planted at lunchtime. There's something almost impressive about a company being big enough that a 40 minute outage barely dents anyone's day-to-day trust in it. Ten years ago a store closing its doors mid-afternoon with no explanation would've been a whole thing. Now it's a shrug and a meme and everybody's back inside twenty minutes later like nothing happened.
I don't have a neat lesson to pull out of this one. It just seemed worth writing down before I forget it happened, which honestly might be by next Tuesday at this rate.