[hkmurakami]

A former Amazon.com engineer in the other discussion thread has indicated that Amazon never seemed to lose revenue during these outages.

>During my time as an engineer working on Amazon.com, we occasionally experienced outages of various lengths. One of the surprising details about these outages is that they really didn't result in any revenue loss. That is, it appeared that customers would simply wait until the website was available again to make their purchase. I would be surprised if that effect doesn't still happen today especially with the availability of Amazon on a variety of platforms (i.e. customers are comfortable ordering from their phones when they couldn't get to the website from their desktop computers).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461

[cdh]

Not to mention, it's free PR. I'd forgotten I needed to order some stuff, but this reminded me, and so I placed the order once they were back up. I'm not sure how common that reaction is, but it might offset the downtime to some extent.

[biot]

This almost makes me wonder whether a startup should identify easily-fixed weak points in its architecture and work on the fix so that it's ready to go, but don't deploy it. When the weak point eventually fails, rush to deploy the ready-made fix and then include a wonderful technical post-mortem of what happened, how you overcame an architectural weakness, and post it on High Scalability and submit it to HN. Small downtime; big PR boost.

[larrys]

A fine idea for a one or two man shop but if with a larger organization you then have a conspiracy. If word leaks could cause some major issues (along with more publicity).

[big_co]

It's not free if they lost millions of dollars in the process. The % of people in your situation is probably less than 1, so the net is still a loss.

[hexonexxon]

I bet that kid that went to jail for DDOSing Amazon back in the day would've liked to have this engineer's comment for his defence when they claimed he did 'millions' in damages

[agiamas]

Exactly. An outage in the homepage once every X years won't result in lost revenue, you'll just login an hour later coz you have already settled in buying from amazon for 100 other reasons. An outage every day on the other hand...Totally different story, you start feeling inconvenience and end up somewhere else.

[mikeash]

I've heard this sort of thing from other places, too. For example, independent software developers who run their own stores also observe that their revenue will wait out outages that aren't excessively long.