Perhaps a sign that America’s workforce is secretly shopping on the job, the collective Internet freaked out about Amazon.com going down for about 40 minutes Monday afternoon before returning around 3:30 p.m. ET.
I don't think I've ever heard such panic over a site being down before. On Slate email, on Twitter, IM from my wife. Everyone is shopping!
— Farhad Manjoo ???????? (@fmanjoo) August 19, 2013
Phew. I almost walked into a bookstore. RT @cnbc: [Update] Amazon website working again after apparent outage earlier. $AMZN
— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) August 19, 2013
If a book sells and Amazon is down, did it really happen?
— Selma Wolfe (@WolfeSelma) August 19, 2013
The Internet has had a rough time lately. On Wednesday, The New York Times site was down for several hours. The next day, The Washington Post (now owned by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO) reported a half-hour interruption caused by the Syrian Electronic Army redirecting articles to the organization’s website. Capping off a tumultuous week, Google also suffered a brief outage Friday. Though the downtime lasted only one to five minutes, it led to a 40% drop in traffic and estimated $500,000 loss (chump change, really).
For the 40-minute period when the website was down, Amazon is estimated by some to have lost about $1,100 to $1,990 in revenue per second.
[Image: Flickr user Aurelijus Valeiša]