[mrdrozdov]

If there is no spike of sales, all hours of sales is worth the same, and assuming Amazon makes 100B per year in online sales, then it seems like a considerable loss, but still a drop in the bucket when compared to their total revenue:

  (1 - (365 * 24 - 4) / (365 * 24)) = 0.000456621...
  0.000456621... * 100,000,000,000 = $45,662,100.4566...

[pc86]

I don't think anyone suggested that 4 hours would make up a sizable part of yearly revenue. That's not the point.

As another poster mentioned, even with the post-outage spike in sales from folks coming back to get what they wanted an hour ago, they lose those impulse sales forever.

[blastrat]

but if that 100B annual sales includes periodic down-time, and this down-time is within the normal annual amount, then you are double counting down-times...