Amazon's Infrastructure No Match for XBOX Shoppers
- By Isabel Wang on November 23, 2006
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FacebookJust spotted this on Newsvine... Amazon ran a special offer for 1000 units of XBOX 360 at $99 each, and eager shoppers brought the site down! Amazon.com was offline for about 20 minutes. I guess that goes to show there are limits to scalability...
Update: the comments on Digg were surprisingly supportive: "Yeah, servers slow down during heavy traffic. Welcome to the Internet." Also: "Obviously there was overwhelming response and perhaps millions of people were clicking reload. That's enough to slow down any server, even Google. Not Amazon's fault."
By the way, those 1000 XBOX 360s sold out in less than 7 seconds.
Update 2: eWeek calls Amazon's Thanksgiving performance "virtually perfect" compared with 6-8x slowdowns and prolonged website outages at Wal-Mart and Macy's.
One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers. Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)
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Comment by Anonymous on Sunday, November 26, 2006
"Scalability" requires a bit of planning most of the time. I guess Amazon did in fact planned, but was still overwhelmed by the amount of traffic. And deploying and turning on an EC2 instance takes a good 5 minutes! Having all 1,000 units sold in just 7 seconds surely won't help their reactive scalability department :)
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