I tried shopping just now and got a fairly cute “sorry” screen with pictures of a bunch of books with apologies as titles (“I’m sorry, my bad”, “Grave Mistake”, “Oops”).
Apparently it’s a widespread outage. This’s gotta be costing them big buxx!
Huh. Seems to be working ok for me.
ETA: I found some sites that said it was down for as long as 40 minutes. Reuters is reporting that it was down for 15 minutes. Affected U.S. and Canada, apparently.
First Google, now Amazon. If I were a regular user of I Can Has Cheezburger, I’d be getting pretty twitchy about now.
You can always come to my house. Our last book count was over 8,000.
Why would they lose money? Anyone who has decided to purchase a particular item from them is not likely to give up on them completely just because of a 15 minute problem. They will just buy it when the site comes back up. Sales over the next few hours will be higher than normal and everything evens out.
They lose the people who decide not to buy at all: “You know what? I am OK! And you’re OK! I don’t need a book to tell me that!”
Or people who just bop over to another site - Barnes and Noble will sell you the same book for around the same price. Best Buy will sell you electronics. Target, Walmart - there are a ton of sites - and very few things Amazon sells exclusively.
There are plenty of folks who haven’t yet decided where they’re purchasing from, and are just as happy with one retailer as another. If you’re down for 15 minutes when that person is trying to execute a purchase, they’ll go somewhere else. Not to punish Amazon for being down, but because they have a purchase to make, and have no idea when Amazon is going to come back up.
They probably get a pretty big chunk of revenue from impulse buys, too. Why do you think One-Click Shopping was such a big deal?
Amazon’s not dead, it’s just resting.
I disagree. It was pining for the fjords! 
You’re not fooling anyone, Amazon. You’ll be stone cold dead in a minute.
Anyway, Forbes is claiming they lost $66,240 per minute, for approximately 30 minutes.
Sometimes those entitled bargain shoppers can get a little tiring…
Boy, I know how that feels.
For Jeff Bezos, that’s the sort of change you find when you clean under the sofa cushions.
Google was down for about 5 minutes on Friday. This company claims that during that time overall Internet traffic dropped by 40 percent!