HDTV Xbox 360 Gaming

$100 Xbox360 special on Amazon.com leads to Amazon.com Crash

November 25th, 2006

As part of the Amazon Customer Vote deal ( cool concept by the way ), customers picked the $100 Xbox360. What should have been a nice PR move for Amazon and a good deal for 1000 customers, turned into a classic slashdot / digg effect ( crunchgear blog for details ). By that I mean an overload of traffic all trying to access the same site at the same time. Not only was the Xbox360 product page not available, but the whole Amazon.com site appeared to be down for several minutes costing the site untold revenue.

While not a remarkable event in itself — walmart.com and other sites have been down this holiday season — it is extra troubling to see Amazon go down as they are now touting their S3 platform for all kinds of services with a focus on reliability and uptime:

Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Scalable: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support an unlimited number of web-scale applications. It uses scale as an advantage: Adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness.

Failure tolerant: The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation, and continues operation with no or minimal interruption.

We’ll check back next week to see if this happens again with the next specially discounted Amazon offer. Right now the “Axion Portable DVD Player” is leading the vote :)

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