Amazon.com Is Down Today… $30,864.20 A Minute Down The Toilet

UPDATE: Amazon was back up when I published this post… for a minute or two… now it’s back down.  Keep the $30,864.20 A MINUTE counting.

If you haven’t already seen it already… the Amazon.com website is down today for a while (I’m not sure how long).

For a company this big who relies so heavily on their website… this is a big deal.

How Big of A Deal?

• 2nd Quarter 2008 Projected Revenues for Amazon = $4 Billion
• That’s $44,444,444 a Day
• $1,851,851 an Hour
• $30,864.20 a Minute
• $514.40 a Second

How Long Was Amazon.com Down?

It is tough to tell how long Amazon.com was down for… but for all of those people who say that Twitter isn’t good for anything… I did a search at Summize.com to see when the Twitter stream started chatting about it (which is usually pretty close to real time nowadays).

Here’s what I found:

I ran this search on Summize.com at about 12:10 pm PST… not more than 5 minutes after Amazon.com came back online… which means that Amazon.com was down for right around 2 hours (can’t get it exact right now). When I ran this search, there were more than 600 mentions of the Amazon.com downtime (likely way more now).

So, if Amazon.com was down for about 2 hours, this flub might have cost them $3,703,702 in lost revenues (according to my rough social media ninja computing skills ;-)… and a ton of semi-negative chatter on the internet. Amazon could actually have used social media to turn this around and lesson the impact.

So Here It Is…

This post has a few lessons:

1. How important uptime is for ecommerce websites (pretty obvious) and how important a backup plan is in cases like these
2. How useful the social media is in fact finding and getting real-time news that companies and the rest of us can use to jump on trends. Look at Twitter… Twitter is more and more becoming a first line as far as breaking news comes… why aren’t all journalists on Twitter again?
3. Throughout all of this… Amazon.com didn’t come out and comfort their customers at all. Not even a message on the error page, no spokesperson on Twitter telling people what was going on, NOTHING. Big and small companies everywhere need to embrace the social media if they want to keep ahead of the crap talking curve online… get out there when the internet starts chatting… be a voice of comfort for your customers.

Popularity: 73% [?]