Comments on: Amazon working again, but what went wrong?

Site is back up and running after a two-hour outage. What went wrong at the e-commerce giant?

[J-Hawaii]

One word: Vista

[n3td3v]

It was U.S Air Force Cyber testing military botnet capabilities.

[esamos]

idiot

[jotadavida]

Akamai? The old gen CDN backbone days of the pioneering wild web west? Hmmm. Hardware does not beat software. Ever been to Akamai's NOC in Cambridge, MA? A sea of winking red lights?

[EcuadorHomesOnline]

They must be using Unix/Linux servers. For the last ten years, Cnet has ALWAYS reported what OS is being used ONLY if the affected site uses Windows servers. Cnet is hugely biased in that regard - Windows is the most reliable and scalable server system, but the biased Cnet reporting is such that they only mention the OS in a website outage if it's a Windows server - so if they don't mention what OS is being used on the affected site, then it's probably Linux/Unix that's at fault.

[EcuadorHomesOnline]

Amazon must be using Linux/Unix servers. For the past ten years, Cnet has had very biased reporting. If a website goes down and the site is using Windows servers, that fact is always mentioned in the article. If the website is not using Windows servers, then they don't mention what OS the site uses - so Amazon.com must be using Linux/Unix or some other operating system less reliable than Windows.

[EcuadorHomesOnline]

It said that the message failed to post, so I re-typed it.

[darylicked]

LOL less reliable than windows. thats a good one.

by the way, its down again as of 9:50 am saturday pacific time

[darylicked]

LOL less reliable than windows. thats a good one.

by the way, its down again as of 9:50 am saturday pacific time

[Demolition]

Actually, Amazon does use Linux. They have been since 2001. They switched away from Windows because it was too costly to maintain and the uptime was abysmal. Meanwhile, Linux costs them 25% less to operate and maintain, and the uptime/availability has been stellar

Now, before someone says "But, if Linux' uptime is so good, then what about this two hour outage?" Well, if Shawn White, Soups Ranjan, and Gordon Haff are correct, then it was due to human error, and not some problem with Linux.

[Wookiee-1138]

It was probably due to the flood of MGS4 preorders.

[jimwhite467]

The logic is very straightforward. When it runs Windows, it is the OS's fault. When it is Linux, it is human error. Duh.

[Dr_Zinj]

"God! What a rat's nest of Christmas-treed plugs and wires. Let's see, it's got to be one of these plugs here with a black cable ..."

[popservationsj]

Happened again to me about a half-hour ago. Same error message when going to the site, while trying to browse certain items further, etc.

[kwilsonjr]

There are still some problems. I got that page (in the example gif) just now while trying to download some mp3's.

[as901]

It could not have been Linux. Almost all of the top 100 companies use Linux, and they were not down. Perhaps the trouble is that many folks are now using the latest Microsoft program, and Amazon was trying to write Java that would work with Microsoft's latest misadventure?

My advice would be to stick with Linux and standard Sun Java only!

[benjaminstraight]

It doesn't matter, it works now.