So Sunday night I was up way too late doing the thing where you buy household stuff on Amazon because youre too lazy to drive to the store, and I had a cart sitting there with a 40-pound bag of cat litter, some AA batteries, and a phone case I definitely didnt need, and I hit "place order" and... nothing. Just sat there spinning. Refreshed it. Spinning. Typed amazon.com into a new tab like that would somehow fix it. Nope, the whole site was just gone.
Turns out it wasnt just me. Amazon.com went down for something like half an hour to 45 minutes depending on who you ask, and it wasnt some tiny blip either, it was a full-on "the page will not load" outage. A research firm that tracks this stuff (Chitika, if you want to look it up) put out a number afterward estimating Amazon loses around $66,240 a minute when the site is down, which they got from backing into Amazons reported revenue per minute. Multiply that out over even a conservative 30 minutes and youre talking about two million dollars evaporating because a server somewhere had a bad night. I have no idea how accurate that math actually is but its a fun number to throw around at people who dont believe the internet is a business.
What I think is more interesting than "big company had an outage" is how much stuff quietly rides on Amazons infrastructure without you ever thinking about it. A chunk of the sites that looked flaky that night werent Amazon.com itself, they were random services running on Amazon Web Services, which is basically the plumbing under half the internet at this point and most people have no idea. You dont notice AWS exists until it hiccups and suddenly some app you use for something totally unrelated to Amazon is also acting weird. Its a little unsettling honestly, this idea that so much of what we do online funnels through the infrastructure of like three or four companies. If Amazons East Coast data center sneezes, apparently my cat litter purchase and some strangers photo-sharing app both catch a cold.
Anyway I gave up around 1am and just went to bed with an empty cart, which, in retrospect, was probably the correct move regardless of the outage, because who needs cat litter that badly at 1am. The order finally went through the next morning without me even trying again, must have auto-saved the cart, which is a small nice touch I dont think Amazon gets enough credit for. Say what you want about the company but their cart persistence has never once failed me and Ive been buying random junk off there since like 2007.
On a totally different note, has anyone else been low-key annoyed by the Yahoo logo thing? Theyve been rolling out a new logo every single day this whole month, "30 days of change" or whatever theyre calling it, building up to some big reveal in September. I get the marketing logic, keep people checking in, generate a little buzz, but every time I open a tab with Yahoo in it (which, fine, is basically never these days except for fantasy football) theres a slightly different logo staring at me and it feels less like anticipation and more like watching someone try on hats in a stores mirror for a month straight. Just pick one. Im sure the actual new logo will be fine, corporate logos always end up fine, but the daily countdown format is doing nothing for me.
Back to the outage thing for a second because I keep thinking about it. Its weird how our reaction to "the internet is down" has changed. Ten years ago if a website went down you shrugged and did something else. Now if Amazon goes dark for forty minutes on a Sunday night its treated like actual news, dollar figures and everything, because so much commerce and infrastructure and daily-life stuff runs through it now. Which I guess just means the stakes went up. Or it means Im the kind of person who stays awake refreshing a broken shopping cart at midnight instead of just going to bed, which, fair, is also a real possibility Ive got to consider here.
Either way the litter arrived Tuesday. Crisis averted.