Amazon’s US Site Goes Down… Millions in Sales Forfeited

amazon down hardVery disturbing to come across THIS at http://amazon.com — generally believed to be one of the strongest and most stable web companies with servers so trusty that thousands of businesses lease space via Amazon’s S3 Web service.

UPDATE: It’s been shaky, but back up after nearly two hours of all systems down. AdAge estimates that Amazon lost about $2 million in sales:

E-comerce site Amazon went down this afternoon around 1:30 EDT and stayed down for at least an hour. Attempts to access Amazon.com were met with the following message: “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.” It’s hard to know exactly how many dollars a minute Amazon loses in sales for every moment its site is down, but simple math pegs it at about $1.8 million an hour, based on Ad Age estimates.

Continue reading “Amazon’s US Site Goes Down… Millions in Sales Forfeited”

When Obama Wins… Will Twitter Implode?

edwards endorses obama

Last week a fun meme went through the twitterverse… “When Obama wins…”

Well today as news broke that former presidential candidate and former senator John Edwards would endorse Barack Obama — after months of speculation as to whether he would endorse at all — Twitter crashed. Related? Most likely. While Twitter has been on the fritz lately, the Obama/Edwards tweets seem to have sent Twitter’s backend beyond the land of 500 server errors and off the deep end.

Will President Obama save Twitter? Or did attorney general-elect John Edwards just break it?