I wonder how much money amazon loses per minute 2 days before christmas. Ouch.

rlpb · on Dec 24, 2009

I don't think that Amazon itself will lose much, since they're well-known enough that most people who fail to reach them will retry later.

I think the small fry using S3 and EC2 will be the ones who are actually hit by this.

cookiecaper · on Dec 24, 2009

I don't know, I don't think it'd be as much as 4 - 7 days before Christmas. Most people know that it's too late to order from Amazon or any other online-only store by the night of Dec. 23. It's probably more money than they'd lose normally, but maybe not that significant?

I have no data to back that up, it's pure speculation.

alain94040 · on Dec 24, 2009

At $20B annual, assuming Christmas is a big chunk, I'm guessing $2B (10%) in the last two weeks, 2 minutes would then be worth $200,000?

I think my 10% number is too low, so maybe $500K for two minutes? But this is not profit, just revenue.

wglb · on Dec 24, 2009

Do you think it might catch up once it is available again? It is a pretty serious shopping destination, and possibly people retry.

robryan · on Dec 24, 2009

It really depends on downtime, if it was more than say an hour a lot of people would probably buy elsewhere, small amount of downtime you wouldn't think would effect sales though.