On Monday afternoon, Amazon.com was down for nearly an entire hour. And it wasn’t just Seller CentralAmazon Seller Central is a portal or a h... More this time. The entire Amazon.com site was offline. That means no orders coming in, no new items being added to the 200 million+ item catalog.
What did the outage cost Amazon and 3rd party sellers. According to our calculations, based on Amazon’s earning reports, we think an hour of downtime is about $5.4 million in lost sales!
Of course, we know this isn’t totally accurate. Because of course, not everyone who was going to buy in that hour decided they didn’t need what they were shopping for after all. And not every Prime member was so offput by the short outage that they took their business to BestBuy.com or to the Target down the street.
But we think it’s an interesting look at the high stakes game that Amazon plays. And imagine if something happened that kept Amazon offline for a full day. That’d be nearly $125 million lost. And you can bet a lot of negative press as well.
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