Amazon downed for 10 minutes due to promotion
Too many requests take out entire web site
Posted on 2006-11-23 14:21:29 by justin

Amazon ran a special promotion this week but under-estimated the demand for the product from users with fast connections. At exactly 2pm EST, the offer was open (an Xbox core system at less than half-price). Unfortunately for Amazon, so many people were waiting for the promotion that the entire Amazon website – not just the promotion page – sank without a trace from just before 2pm, to at least 2:12pm. The home page, the product pages, everything, were unavailable.

While attracting a lot of traffic to the amazon pages at once sounds like a good idea we wonder how many amazon shoppers elsewhere in the site abandoned their purchases halfway through after they found their experience destroyed by the vote rush going on in the next room. Was the quid worth the quo? (some people got quite irate).

The poor performance of the amazon site during the giveaway also reflects badly on the Amazon “elastic compute cloud” offering (Amazon EC2) which is designed, supposedly, to offer instant capacity to companies which need to deal with exactly this kind of sudden rush.

On the other hand, this story could just be bad eggs because we didn’t get one either.