If you tried to access the Amazon.com web site on Friday you may have noticed something rather unusual: it wasn’t there. Amazon is reporting that their website experienced a serious server problem which caused the site to be off-line for about 2 1/2 hours Friday afternoon.
Although it is not uncommon to find web sites down from time to time online, for a major site like Amazon.com, it is extremely rare. It’s a bit like searching for google.com and instead getting a 404 error message — it can happen, but it is certainly not a common occurrence
And for a major shopping portal like Amazon.com, 2 1/2 hours off line can result in a huge loss of profits. In the last quarter alone, Amazon reported over $2 billion in sales — and those figures are just from North America.
So is easy to see how any server problem that causes the site to be down is taken very seriously by the company. Time is money, and that is especially true for big companies online. The impact that the outage had on Amazon’s daily sales figures has not been released, but many industry experts speculate that $3-$4 hundred-thousand dollars could have been lost during the 2 1/2 hour server “meltdown” Amazon experienced on Friday.
In all fairness to Amazon, their web site is extremely complicated on the backend, and uses cookies more effectively than just about any other site online. But all that interaction between Amazon’s back-end servers and the user’s Web browser can at times be a recipe for disaster. The amount of programming and coding it takes to maintain such a complicated site is considerable, and it only takes one unforeseen combination of data “events” in order to crash the system.
For this reason, Amazon is constantly testing and retesting various aspects of its web site on a variety of Web browsers, using Mac, Windows and Linux computers. But even with all this back-end testing going on continuously, it is still possible to have a crash.
It is interesting to note that only Amazon’s North American web site was affected by the problem — the company’s international sites are (wisely) hosted in different locations, and were not affected by the outage.
Among tech-support experts, there is a well-known truism: “the more complicated something is — the more likely it will break down.” Companies such as Google.com have held this philosophy in mind when designing their sites.
Unlike Amazon, Google has one of the simplest web sites online, with the most basic and user-friendly interface imaginable. And even though they are the most trafficked search engine in the world, Google.com rarely has a server problem or drops off-line for any length of time.
Perhaps Amazon should take a lesson from Google, and redesign their website with the KISS rule in mind (Keep It Simple Stupid).
