Tuesday, 20 August 2013
When you’re an online retail giant, every second that your website stays inaccessible means thousands of dollars out the virtual door. Amazon.com’s website went down around 1 p.m. Pacific time today for as much as 45 minutes due to unknown causes.
Estimates differ on exactly how long Amazon was offline: Some reports have it at 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 40 minutes, and 45 minutes. At 40 minutes, the outage could have cost the company as much as $4.72 million in lost sales, the Puget Sound Business Journal estimated, based on the company’s average sales of $117,882 per minute
Visitors to the US shopping site were greeted with a message saying: "Oops! We're very sorry," alongside a "500 Service Unavailable Error" report.
The site returned online about half an hour after the problem was first flagged by users of the news site Reddit.
The firm's UK site was not affected by the issue, however its Canadian home page also showed an error message.
The support section of Intel's website and some pages which are only accessible to the computer chip-maker's staff also became unavailable for a period on Monday. A spokeswoman said this was due to an "internal issue" and it was a coincidence that it had occurred shortly after Amazon's problem.
