4 ms·
A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just c
by gkoberger 14y ago
A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461
[Edit: That being said, there's also the statistic that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1%. Imagine what 20+ minutes of "latency" would do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900]
- ankitml 14y agothe latency vs cost curve will not be linear. After some latency, increase in latency wont affect cost much.
- troels 14y agoAlso, latency (a constant lack of resources) and down time (an extraordinary lack of resources) are two very different things. I wouldn't be surprised if some down time had little impact on sales, whereas latency has a lot.
- ankitml 14y agotrue! latency is also location dependent. so in latency network and health of other external 'resources' also matter. Whereas downtime is only a server issue. So they are two very different things.
- jonny_eh 14y agoI imagine the difference between latency and downtime is that latency tends to occur every time you visit, while by definition, downtime is more rare. In other words, latency provides a bad experience, while downtime provides no experience.
- SatvikBeri 14y agoThe Oatmeal actually has a great comparison of how people react to latency vs how they react to downtime: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/no_internet http://theoatmeal.com/comics/no_internet
- coldtea 14y ago>A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later. Brick and mortar stores found that out ages ago. They were closed for large parts of the day/night and the customers just came back the next day. If people didn't leave Tumblr and Twitter, with their constant massive outages (at some point in their life), when why would the leave Amazon, a huge established player, for a few hours outage?
- ams6110 14y agoI doubt many would leave Amazon permanently because of a service outage, but it probably does cost them something in impulse purchases, if the impulsive desire for the item passes during the downtime.
- ryusage 14y agoNo, you would think that, but actually if you read the comment referenced above, what they actually found is that outages seem to have little effect on revenues. That's why it's so surprising, really. The implication seems to be that their customers don't actually spend a whole lot on impulse buys.
- freehunter 14y agoFunny enough, I've gone to a brick and mortar store to find it was closed, then went back home and bought the item on Amazon. I wanted it right then, but since I would have to wait until the next day anyway I just ordered it online. Contrast that with going to Amazon and finding their site is down or performing poorly; I have never gone to the store to buy something instead. If I was already going to be ordering it online, I was already resigned to waiting a day or two for it to arrive.
- philwelch 14y agoTumblr and Twitter have orders of magnitude fewer users than Amazon.
- 14y ago
- wdr1 14y agoThis is true by my experience. I went online last night to buy a replacement garden hose. Was surprised Amazon was down. After confirming it wasn't just me (thanks isitdownforeveryoneorjustme.com), I gave up and ordered it this morning.