August 20, 2013 6:19 pm

Rebecca Murtagh

Amazon.com Goes Down, 404 Message Offers Light-Hearted Apology While Losing Millions

On Monday, August 19th, 2013 Amazon.com went down for approximately 40 minutes, resulting in an estimated $4.8 million loss in sales.This is based on an estimated $120,000 in revenue generated for every minute of the day.

Of course with that kind of sales volume, chances are customers will notice. And, boy did they. The observation was widely reported on social media.

Twitter updates covered Amazon website going down, and its recovery.

Twitter users react to Amazon.com being down

Amazon itself was not very visible in the stream of tweets about the site going down. Fast company, Business Insider, Mashable, as well as internet personalities Barry Schwartz, Brian Clark, Danny Goodwin (and yours truly) chimed in to share the news.

A Light-Hearted Alternative to the 404 Error Message

However, if one tried to visit Amazon.com during the outage, they were served up the following graphic, which revealed an apologetic, funny error message, in lieu of the traditional 404 error message.

Amazon.com posts funny apology while site is down
Amazon.com 404 Error Page:

The titles displayed with Amazon’s apology displayed books titled “I’m Sorry…My Bad!“, “Oops!” and “Grave Mistake“, which added a little levity to the situation. Although I am quite confident there was not much levity behind the scenes while Amazon attempted to identify the problem and recover the website to full functionality.

About the Author

Rebecca Murtagh: Human First Futurist, CEO & Founder of Human AI Institute, winner of the Inc. Magazine Power Partner Award.

Rebecca leverages decades of experience working with Fortune 500, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Mains Street, global brands and startup entrepreneurs to help executives, their teams, and entrepreneurs leverage their genius through Human AI to improve productivity, collaboration, creativity and job satisfaction for optimum performance and long-term success.

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