http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Amazon.com%27s+annua...
(This ignores a lot of important factors: not all pages being down, it happening in peak US hours, not accounting for the uninterrupted AWS revenue, having to purchase new hardware, damaged brand, etc)
>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://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Amazon+profit%2F+%28...
This is a very low time of the year for commerce.
A certain (fairly large?) percentage of potential customers will simply return later in the day to make their purchases.I checked out Twitter for the first time in a while to see if anyone was talking about the Amazon outage. I ran a search for "Amazon", and one of the tweets I saw was Scott Hanselman linking to his review of the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, which included a review of the Kindle Cover. The review was pretty convincing, so I ended up buying the cover yesterday night.
So in a way, Amazon's outage yesterday directly resulted in me ordering a $35 product from Amazon.
This probably (inconclusively of course) confirms what other people are saying here - I'm not surprised that Amazon gets some free PR from this mess, which earns evens out any potential lost revenue.
Or, you know, when we've trusted the affected company in turn to run the infrastructure for so many of our businesses.