Just 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.
