Amazon Collapses Under Weight of 1,000 Xboxes

theodp writes "Is there such a thing as a BusinessWeek Cover Jinx? Amazon was bitten by the success of its 1,000 Xboxes for $100 promotion, which brought the entire site to its knees for about 15 minutes on Thanksgiving Day. Singing the too-much-traffic blues on Black Friday were Wal-Mart and Disney."

They should have known better

[Salvance]

I wonder why they didn't just setup a basic html page or two for the home page in order to handle the traffic. By enabling a landing page for 15 minutes or so, they could have directed all the folks seeking these incredible deals to the correct page, instead of ensuring everyone is fed dynamic CPU-intensive pages. It's not like it's the first time that Walmart or Amazon have experienced traffic spikes.

Re:They should have known better

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Wouldn't that also defeat the purpose of the whole promotion though? I mean, if you're giving away a hundred x-boxes to drag as many people as possible to your site, and all you get out of them is 100 xBox sales, you've lost cash. It's the continued shopping that you're hoping for....

Re:

[Sigma 7]

Wouldn't that also defeat the purpose of the whole promotion though? I mean, if you're giving away a hundred x-boxes to drag as many people as possible to your site, and all you get out of them is 100 xBox sales, you've lost cash. It's the continued shopping that you're hoping for....

It's not that difficult to hard-code "People who buy X-Boxes also purchase" into the .HTML description page. Granted, it might not be optimal, but it works enough - at the very least, include links to hard-coded pages that sho

Re:They should have known better

[TubeSteak]

If those websites couldn't handle hordes of shoppers, I can't imagine what'd happen if someone was actively trying to blast 'em off the internet.

Seems to me like that'd have been the perfect time to launch a malicious DDOS aimed at those big online retailers. Kinda like how some jokers went around supergluing locks the night before.

Re:

[bangzilla]

Gosh - we never thought of that...! Of course if you look at the Amazon home page you'll see it's all dynamically calculated content - not static. And it wasn't the site that had the problem on Thursday anyway. Problems lay elsewhere...

No Chance

[Renraku]

There was almost no chance at getting one of these. The site was completely and utterly unresponsive between 1:56PM EST and 2:09PM EST. When a page loaded at 2:09PM, it was sold out.

It would have been different if at 2:00:23PM EST it said it was sold out, but not. It might as well not have been on there at all, because getting that deal was pretty much impossible. I wonder how many of the winners were on Amazon's network?

Re:

[RuBLed]

well, the article said it was sold out in 29 seconds.. so yes.. there is no chance...

Re:No Chance

[11223]

No more than 999 were on Amazon's network. I got one.

I had two networks to choose from: Comcast cable modem, and a supposedly "slower" SBC DSL connection. I ended up using the DSL as Amazon went unreachable on the cable modem at 5 till 1 (CST). At 1:00, Amazon was taking 10-20 seconds to load, but it did load. I clicked, answered a simple math question ("what's 18 + 19" IIRC), and it gave me the "you've got it" page.

I'm still shocked I got it, especially since I'm in Chicago, not on the west coast.

Re:No Chance

[Crysalim]

You are the first person I have seen claim they got the code. I didn't believe anyone did until now, but that's only because I also was able to make it to the question link...

...but when I answered the question (19 + 6), it turned me down. It was incredibly frustrating, because I was under the impression that I had already received a claim code (this is what the buying tips [amazon.com] page said), and it was waiting for me to answer that question.


Screenshots: (1) The question [ngsam.com] | (2) The denial [ngsam.com]

Re:

[ergo98]

You are the first person I have seen claim they got the code.

Only 1000 people got the code. 1000 is a very small number, and it's unlikely that many of those 1000 happen to visit the same online hangouts that you do.

This whole thing is rather absurd (I'm speaking more to comments on the linked page rather to your specific comment - excuse me while I blather) - a bunch of people got their hopes up, against tremendous odds (it wasn't a small number of people who knew about this deal. I was at lunch and a lunc

Re:

[chaboud]

The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.

Where does this come from? I've spouted it before (when I was much younger), but it's just wrong.

The lottery is:
A. A tax on people who want to dream so much that they wouldn't do math if they could.
B. Perfect for people who can do math.

Look at it this way. Much like blackjack, the lottery is a game with history, in which the odds/payoff ratio varies over time. If you bet the same amount every time you play, you'll end up losing out (the payout on the lottery doesn't climb as quickly as the money that goe

Re:

[pboulang]

A mathematician would look at his Expected Value as it pertains to game theory. As such, yes it may be that in certain situations there is +EV, but they don't exist in reality. This is due to the fact that MORE people would play, cutting down on what you could possibly win (splitting pots, etc).

If there ever comes a time when there is +EV for a play in the lottery, then I guarantee that the lottery would cease to exist -- the pot would change. The people running the lottery kinda pay attention to that. Ac

Re:

[chaboud]

That's just plainly not true. The sad thing is that the number of tickets purchased is not wildly responsive to the expected value of that play. It's responsive, but not as much as it should be in a strictly rational sense. Who wants to wait?

It's utter nonsense to say that "MORE people would play," to cover your bases on this one. Yes, more people will play, but that is merely a pressure on the game. It is not a forced constraint. In John Corbett and Charlie Geyer's writeup based on expected play of P

Re:

[pboulang]

I did neglect the fact that in certain situations, the value will exceed the odds. That's a good point. So yes, at certain points in time EV goes positive. (assuming odds of picking powerball winning numbers is 146,000,000:1. [5 from a bucket of 55 balls, 1 from a bucket of 42 => (5!/(55*54*53*52*51))*(1/42)] )

However, this is also simplifying in looking at a single all or nothing scenario, meaning that it would take many many iterations before this would hold true. However, the number of bets needed t

Re:

[pboulang]

oops, also you forgot to include taxes in your calculations. It was so long since my original post, I forgot we were talking reality vs academic, and taxes are so very very real :(

So, the number of times the payout * .4 (fed + state) > $146MM is even lower. Your $365MM big win drops to about $185MM lump then $111MM. So, you can only play in situations where the published number is what, $480MM?

Nevertheless, your point that the lottery can in some situations will have +EV still stands. You just are

Re:

[chaboud]

Don't forget the $0.1971 fixed expected value of the ticket (also subject to taxes). If we neglect taxes on small prizes (do you report $3?), one need merely have an after-tax lump-sum of ~$117MM.

I think it's safe to say that we're both safe from winning (or playing) the lottery any time soon.

Re:

[pboulang]

And this statement comes only from those who have no concept of risk/reward. e.g. That it can be entirely rational to "risk" $2 if you're not strapped for cash when the unlikely but remotely possible reward is millions.

This is quite possibly the least informed statement I have ever read here. If you have defended the lottery with "payment for a bit of a thrill", you might have a valid point. However, attacking those with "no concept of risk/reward" is more than a little bit of a projection. Feel free to l

Re:

[pboulang]

Whoosh. By your line of thought, the only reason you don't play the lottery is that you don't make enough money. Absolute brilliance.

Twice now you've failed to rationally explain your unique vision of risk reward. Ah, maybe you simply don't understand the word rational. Yes, that must be it. Hey, why don't you reply again with your argument that $2 is very little money and therefore no matter how low the chances and how short a human life is, there is still a viable risk/reward scenario.

Who thinks that

Re:

[pboulang]

Way to act like a 12 year old loser. You have no idea what you are talking about. Before you use words you don't understand, I suggest you read about game theory. Nice of you to resort again to attacking me and actual facts instead of bringing a real argument to the table. You need to go back to jerking off because you are obviously no good at this.

Re:

[pboulang]

Oh, and let me guess - home insurance is a scam, right? I mean the premium xs the statistical period loss definitely makes it a losers game, right?

Even a retarded monkey wouldn't confuse a risk-reward scenario with a risk alleviation scenario. You make me laugh. Why do you even try? You keep falling on your face. Once again, no argument, simply utterly stupid comments.

Re:

[pboulang]

Actually, my dear idiot, the same concept applies to both, although the monetary balance flips. A small expenditure for an incredibly unlikely great reward shares startling fundamentals with a relatively small expenditure for an unlikely great risk. In both cases you are a net loser, but one would have to be a startling idiot to say that home insurance is only for people who are bad at math.

You really don't put any thought into your replies, do you? People that pay for home insurance do so because they ca

Re:

[pboulang]

Somehow I think the odds of icebergs causing damage in Kansas to be somewhat shy of 1 in 13 million.

And that brings us full circle to my point: The odds need to be taken into consideration.

Thank you,

QED

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there was. I heard rumors that going directly to the ip would have it load. I imagine that disabling images and what not would improve your chances. Simple common sense stuff, but nothing that would give anyone a guarantee. Alas, it was fate that sold these things.

Re:

[Main Gauche]

"I imagine that disabling images and what not would improve your chances. Simple common sense stuff,"

Disabling images is common sense... until they throw a captcha (or other critical graphic) at you that you need to see to claim the prize.

Re:

[rbarreira]

Then you just right click and press "show image".

Re:

[blincoln]

I imagine that disabling images and what not would improve your chances.

I don't think so. When I couldn't load the page in my browser, I tried telnetting in on port 80 in order to do a raw GET of the URL. I couldn't even connect to enter the command.

Re:

[ben there...]

Disabling images likely wouldn't do anything. For one thing, the page would load with a placeholder for the missing image anyway. Also, the images are on a different server, so loading them doesn't even slow down the page you're trying to load. FlashBlock might have helped, as flash ads can cause the tables they're in not to reflow until the ad is loaded on some pages with tables. And using the IP instead of the domain name likely would have helped, because it may have been their DNS server that got overloa

Re:

[pboulang]

And using the IP instead of the domain name likely would have helped, because it may have been their DNS server that got overloaded.

no. That's silly thinking.

Re:

[Merc248]

I had two computers refreshing the page on my DSL connection (a bit redundant and counter-intuitive, I know)... took like five minutes for the page to come up.

Here's the kicker: it came up at around 11:01 AM PST. Sold out.

The article is missing the Amazon link!!!!

[Wolfier]

here [amazon.com] evil grin

Re:

[DeadBugs]

Don't forget the shameless self-promotion that started this all. Use a referral link like this... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/pr ime1-20 [amazon.com]

Re:

[LordKronos]

I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I do disagree a bit with how you got there. Doesn't alexa base their statistics on people who have their toolbar installed? I believe that people who frequent slashdot are probably a bit more finicky about what toolbars they install in their browser than are amazon's typical visitors.

You want the blues?

[AltGrendel]

How about this [ebay.com]? Talk about one stupid seller.

. The guy will probably protest it though.

THIS should be a Slashdot story... Submit it

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the buyer asking if the contract is binding [freeadvice.com] including an email from the seller.

Re:

[triclipse]

He could always just sue him in small claims court (no attorneys allowed). He would lose, but he could do it.

Re:

[MBC1977]

Now that is an individual who should resell that for 2000 dollars and make a killer profit.

And for the seller... Sucks to Be You!!

Re:You want the blues?

[cgenman]

Lots of online retailers have put up items at mistakenly low prices, only to retract later. It's not at all uncommon. They refund your money, and keep the goods.

I forget what the legal defense of this position was, but it seemed airtight. Anyone remember offhand?

Re:

[DietFluffy]

the legal defense is "mistake"

Re:You want the blues?

[unother]

Almost as funny (for different reasons) was this guy [ebay.com] selling a PS3.

Check out some of the pictures. What's with the fish?

Re:Not moving the merch

[Migraineman]

Looks like his two PS3s are still for sale, though at a substantial discount from the $1999 he was origianlly hoping for. I hope he enjoys playing with his two shiny PS3s, 'cause he's still horribly overpriced. The dude has completely missed the window of opportunity.

Amusingly, on the updated eBay page [ebay.com], he's removed the pics of his girlfriend, but retained the fish photo. Maybe he'll throw in some fresh fish filets:

Butthead eBay gouger : Hmmm, I'll make a quick buck by gouging some desperate fool
Bu

Re:

[Impotent_Emperor]

Maybe if you buy his PS3 for $2000, his girlfriend will give you a "happy ending". And the fish must be for the fetish freaks.

Re:

[antic]

Happy ending? Didn't you notice her braces??

Re:

[MarkRose]

This is eBay we're talking about. You missed the unspecified $3000 in shipping. Pwned!

Inconsistancy

[Genocaust]

So was Amazon selling 1,000 XBOX systems at $100? Or selling a $1,000 XBOX system at $100?

Re:

[Sneakernets]

Well, think about it. if you wanted an Xbox 360, which choice would make you visit amazon.com to check it out?

Re:

[edschurr]

Obviously anyone would go for the thousand Xboxes for only $100. You could make $400,000 easy.

Typical

[slobber]

That's what typically happens when marketing is out of touch with engineering. My educated guess would be that marketing droids "forgot" to mention this promotion to engineering. If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.

And of course it was the tech team which ended up spending its holidays fixing the site, not marketing. (You can probably tell that I am taking it a bit personally and for a reason...)

Re:Typical

[Bamafan77]

That's what typically happens when marketing is out of touch with engineering. My educated guess would be that marketing droids "forgot" to mention this promotion to engineering. If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.

Eh, I don't know. A site as big as Amazon probably suffers from DOS almost daily. (In fact, an average day of legit traffic for Amazon.com would probably be indistinguishable from a DOS attack for most sites). And I'm sure Amazon has had past promotions that caused traffic surges too. I'm guessing they(including engineering) underestimated the popularity of THIS particular promotion.

Re:

[Cassini2]

Either that, or engineering couldn't figure out if they would rather complain about the promotion, or try to win the promotion!

Re:

[Blakey Rat]

A competitor of Amazon's, woot.com, runs a promotion like this every single day for some overstocked items, selling them at sometimes ridiculous prices. They also go down almost every single day, from my experience, in the same way Amazon.com did. I think you reach a certain point of traffic spike, and it's just not possible to compensate it. The Slashdot Effect is nothing compared to the "I want cheap shit" effect... look at Wal-Mart, for instance.

Re:

[timeOday]

If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.

Do you have some reason to think this was not a successful promotion? The fact that the website got slow is probably as discouraging to Amazon as the fact that people waited in line for a week to get a PS3 was to Sony.

Re:

[DerekLyons]

That's what typically happens when marketing is out of touch with engineering. My educated guess would be that marketing droids "forgot" to mention this promotion to engineering. If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.

Ah yes, that famous conceit of IT workers... That, somehow, *they* are the ones who decides what is good for the company and what is not, based on whether or not *they* will be inconveni

Re:

[sholden]

That's right. And when marketing decides to promote their great new idea of teleporting a new Xbox down your internet connection so you don't have to wait for shipping, screw the tech losers who claim that will be hard for them to do.

They can work a weekend to write the code...

Re:

[FLEB]

OTOH, though, they do have your name and contact info now. You don't completely "leave the store" as easily on the Internet.

Even the apple store

[c0nst]

Apple relatively rare deals on iPods bought store was down for a couple of hours today.

..and now this!

[TheSpatulaOfLove]

Jeez - You would've thought they were selling Bags Of Crap with the way that server went down...



On a serious note. They knew this was coming. It was marketed heavily and they should be ashamed for not being prepared to handle the onslaught of refreshers.

Re:..and now this!

[Firehed]

They probably were about as prepared as they could have been. Sometimes, doubling your fleet of servers for a single known traffic spike just isn't a viable choice. Especially if the reason for the traffic spike is a loss leader to begin with.

Stupid promotion anyway

[iendedi]

How does Amazon think that a promotion like that would increase overall sales anyway? What they should have done is said that XBoxs will be onsale randomly throughout the day, so check the price from time to time to see if you are a lucky recipient of the sales price. There will be 100 randomly allocated sales items to customers each hour until the promotion ends.

That would bring more traffic to their website and keep it there all day. Much better idea!

Oh wait... Hmm....

Re:Stupid promotion anyway

[asuffield]

How does Amazon think that a promotion like that would increase overall sales anyway?

Marketdroids, by and large, act like spoiled children. Attention-grabbing stunts are all they do. It works to a limited extent - insofar as it keeps people talking about Amazon. It may not be particularly effective, but nobody ever accused marketdroids of being very smart.

Re:

[YoungHack]

I'm not sure it wasn't effective. I'm a regular Amazon user, but I'll admit that all of the buzz about promotions and specials had me checking back way more often than I would normally visit the site. I haven't made many purchases, but I've added a lot of things to my wishlist that might become future purchases.

Re:

[Ginger Unicorn]

Well, since it's their job to attract attention to a product, I would say they are professionals doing their job, rather than spoiled children. Just because their job description is to pander to human stupidity doesn't mean they themselves are stupid.

Add onto the "Black Friday Blues" list...

[Avillia]

CompUSA and Best Buy. Black Friday must be a living nightmare for the half-assed tech staff shopping stores must hire to some extent.

Surprisingly enough, Circuit City loaded perfectly fine. Does this say something about it's popularity, or it's hiring practices for IT?

Using my top notch Slashdot analytical methods

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the fact CompUSA is running on IIS [netcraft.com], Best Buy is running Apache on Linux [netcraft.com] via Akamai and Circuit City is running SUN One [netcraft.com] via Akami, we can conclude that Comp USA's tech is half-assed, and Best Buy and Circuit City's techs may be half-assed, but Circuit City is helped by being less popular.

Re:

[Behrooz]

My roommate works at best buy. He went in at 3AM this morning, and came home at 9PM tonight.

18 hours. Not bad for non-government work...

price

[jest3r]

I'd buy an XBOX 360 for $100 .. heck I'd buy 10.

Woot.com happens all the time.

[tecker]

Ehh. This is nothing new. You should see Woot.com after they throw up a Bag-o-Crap on the site during a "wootoff". Their site at least says "Server is to Busy". Maybe Amazon.com should have thought twice before deciding to do a stunt like that.

Hey wait a second. When was the last time a Microsoft product cause a VOLUNTARY distributed denial of service attack?

Re:

[Blakey Rat]

I know you're trying to do some snarky Microsoft-bashing, but the last time was about two days ago when Slashdot posted that the number of people downloading movies and TV shows from Xbox Live was overloading Microsoft's servers because they didn't anticipate the demand.

Apple Store too?

[sakusha]

I haven't been able to get into the Apple Store tonight, it's been down all evening. They had a big one-day sale today, I bought a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse ($11 off, yay!) this afternoon and now I can't back get in to check the order status.

I've never heard of the Apple Store going down under a high load, but it often goes down briefly when product or price changes are made. I figure it didn't go down due to high traffic, but this is a rather long outage, compared to most updates. But still, it should be givi

Re:

[sakusha]

The Apple Store just came back online, and yep, it looks like it was excessive traffic that killed it. It came back online with the one-day sale still in place. Usually they only go offline to add or remove content like this. Usually WebObjects is pretty robust under heavy loads.

And whoever moderated the parent as offtopic, please RTFSubmission, it talked about Amazon AND WalMart AND Disney going offline due to heavy traffic. These online stores are the big guns and if they go down on Black Friday, it's new

'beta test' ?

[Quixote]

Amazon has begun offering a service called elastic compute cloud [amazon.com] (EC2). It is designed to offer scalable computing/storage solutions designed to handle, (drumroll), traffic spikes.

Which leads me to think: was this a beta test for this EC2 system? I mean, there's no better bait for the millions of youngsters out there than a cheap top-o-the-line console. What better way to stress test your system than to have 100s of 1000s of people hit your site at the same time? If Amazon has logged the traffic data (and they'd be incredibly stupid not to), it would be a gold mine for their engineers. Eventually expect them to offer just such a service which can handle the such spikes, and pitch it to the Best Buys and Walmarts of the the world.

Re:

[Poromenos1]

If their grid of who-knows-how-many computers couldn't handle serving pages, who's going to want to use it for other stuff?

Slashdot

[jrmiller84]

Now let's see of they can survive a slashdotting!

Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[ConfusedSelfHating]

No I don't have proof, but having the most prominent retail website in the world hawk your product is worth a lot of cash. The $100 special gets reported by multiple media sources, "1000 Xbox 360s sell out in 9 minutes", "Demand for Xbox 360s brings down Amazon's website". If Sony wants the headlines of people going crazy about the PS3, why wouldn't Microsoft want the same? Does anyone believe that 10 minutes of poor connectivity will hurt a website's reputation? Server problems yes, super cheap deals no. "Oh no, too many people are coming to our website for the great, great deals!" People are going to associate Amazon's name with amazing one time sales, which is only going to help them. Both Microsoft and Amazon have benefited from this sale.

Re:

[lilfields]

To make it more ironic IBM developed the Xbox 360 processors, so the story could go like: "1000 Xbox 360s powered by IBM processors sell out in 9 minutes bringing down Amazon.com...IBM claims HP powered servers were the cause of the site's shortfall..." In follow up story: "IBM finally reeps profits from it's patent one-click-shopping through Amazon.com without going to court"

Re:Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal

[Nightspirit]

Except amazon users voted which special they wanted. Sure, the other offers were crap, and didn't have much chance of getting voted for, but then you're suggesting MS paid amazon to have a "potential" sale, which may never happen. Sounds way too tin foil for my tastes.

And I doubt amazon even lost much money. Supposedly MS are now making $70 profit for the premium system, and likely much more for the core system. Seeing how some retailers are dropping $60-$100 off the premium package already (dell.com for instance, once you put it in the shopping cart) I would expect a retail price drop in 3-6 months, probably $360 for the premium (what dell is currently selling it for) and $260 for the core.

And I suspect Microsoft wasn't alone...

[rmckeethen]

This is the email I sent to the Associated Press after they reported the $100 X-Box 360 deal in a story, but failed to mention the number of consoles Amazon had for sale at the discounted price:

Hello,

I'm writing to express my deep concerns about your story titled "Some stores begin shopping season early" by Shaila Dani, on November 24th, 2006.

My biggest concern about this piece is Dani's mention of Amazon's limited sale of deeply-discounted X-Box 360 consoles. As far as I can tell, this story appeared on Yahoo! more than an hour *after* these consoles went on sale. The story lacked specifics as to the number of consoles available on Amazon's web site, so readers had no way of knowing if they could take advantage of Amazon's discounted price once they read the piece. It appears as if Dani wrote the story to entice online readers to visit Amazon's web site in search of a 66% discount on a popular game console. This smells to me like a 'bait & switch' advertising tactic, and it makes me wonder if your news agency, or the story's writer, colluded with principles from Amazon in order to drive Internet traffic to Amazon's web site.

Shame on you Associated Press! It isn't news you're reporting anymore; this is plainly advertising, cloaked as a legitimate news piece. Thanks for contributing to the continuing degradation of journalism in the public's eye. The lack of ethical standards and plain common sense in this story makes me think your vaulted writers and associated newspaper publishers are nothing more than advertising hacks in disguise.

Re:

[Stealth Potato]

9 minutes? No fricking way. They were sold out within 30 seconds. I know because I managed to get through their confirmation page at 11:00:30AM PST, and I got the "sold out" message. I live near Seattle, so the worst I had was waiting about ten seconds for each page to load.

Actually, I managed to get the confirmation page by 11:00:15, but I somehow didn't notice a little "I agree to these terms" checkbox before I clicked through. The confirmation failed, and I had to do it again. If it wasn't for that extra

Re:

[metamatic]

Mmm, illegal dumping by a convicted monopolist. Tasty.

Re:

[ahoehn]

Nine Minutes? I finally got through at 11:02, 2 minutes after the sale supposedly went live, and they were all sold out.

Collapse

[Psychotria]

The fact that the Amazon jungle has collapsed under the weight of a thousand boxes surprises me little. In fact I thought the number would have been more. Boxes to transport wood, made of... wood... it's no wonder really. This is a sad day. The diversity of species in the Amazon is huge. The fact that it has collapsed is worrying to say the least. This is likely to result in a whole series of follow-on effects: Global Warming will quicken; The ice-caps will melt; The Ozone Hole will become a non-issue (the hole will be so big, we'll start calling normal bits of sky the Ozone Zones). I have no idea why nobody thought of the children.

Packaging

[camperdave]

It must be the excessive packaging that they use these days. All that cardboard has to come from somewhere. It might as well be Amazonian jungle foliage, since the rain forest is doomed from the pollution everyone will cause when they fire up their X-Boxes, Wiis, and PS3s (and the TVs they connect to).

Ah, that's the true reason for one-click

[tlhIngan]

Because if everyone had to keep clicking through the checkout process, every transaction would add another 3 or 4 page loads. One click is merely a way to avoid these extra page loads and not bring down the server too often.

That, and it also explains why there's no link in the story - we don't want to slashdot Amazon again, do we?

Re:

[Blakey Rat]

The deal was done as a coupon code. If you were one of the first thousand, you got a $200-off coupon code for that item. Once you had the code, you could come back at your leisure to set up the order for it.

Exactly like Madman's AU$10 DVDs for 10 Hours sale

[Devar]

Exactly the same thing happened to Madman [madman.com.au]'s website when they had an online AU$10 DVDs for 10 Hours sale to celebrate their tenth anniversary. The website was completely inaccessible for those 10 hours, and led to a lot of irate anime fanboys. ;)

The Truth is...

[JimXugle]

A lot of the traffic came from Digg... the $100 XB360 story was on the front page twice. Once when it originally broke, and a reminder on thanksgiving.

I think it did the job

[dalmiroy2k]

I don't even live in America, but a week ago I re-opened an US Amazon account just for this promo.
Even considering shipping and customs (no less than 100 dollars I think) It was a hell of a deal...
Oh, after that, I browsed around the site and bought "World War Z" and planning to buy "I am legend",

100 behemoths

[njfuzzy]

Presumably, the weight of the controllers contributed most to the crushing.

official response from Amazon customer service

[DragonTHC]

Thank you for writing about this situation which you encoutered with
our web site.

First, please allow me to express my sincere apologies for any
frustration that has been caused. It is certainly not our intention
for our customers to have anything but a pleasant experience at our
store.

We are working hard to provide a stress-free and convenient holiday
shopping experience at Amazon.com. Unfortunately, we have not met
that standard in this case.

Please note many customers voted for customer vote program and were
waiting to place their orders at 11 A.M. This caused high network
traffic and hence our web site was slow.

We utilize top of the line servers, internal routers and network
connections. Although we often wish we could avert this problem,
many issues regarding speed are actually a result of complex
routing patterns over the Internet itself. Even the best Internet
services can't get around this fundamental problems.

To help prevent this problem in the future, you can reset your
cachesize. Go to the "Cache" or "Temporary Internet Files" option
on your web browser (in Internet Explorer, go to "Tools" and
choose "Internet Options"; if you use Netscape, go to "Options" and
choose "Network Preferences"), and make sure you have your memory
cache set to 3000 kilobytes, and your disk cache set to 5000
kilobytes.

For instructions on clearing your cache on other browsers and
platforms, please consult your browser's help documentation for
details on how to manage this process.

We here at Amazon customer service continuously strive to assist the
customers in each and every way can and feel disappointed when we
are unable to address customer's concerns. I hope you can understand
our limitations in this regard.

as if the problem were the fault of my firefox cache

Re:

[AKAImBatman]

They were selling 1,000 XBox 360s for only $100 a piece. The deal started at exactly 2PM EST, the exact period of time Amazon went down. Entire forums of people were sitting and refreshing the pages. It was pretty easy to gauge what the cause was. :-/

Re:

[Nimey]

And how many ping-pong balls could fit in the fora?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ping is blocked by Amazon's firewall.

Re:

[utopianfiat]

Most things collapse under the weight of just one xbox [encycloped...matica.com]. I'm surprised that Amazon survived as long as it did under something so hueg [encycloped...matica.com].

Apparently I struck a nerve?

[Sneakernets]

Is it always cool to downmod when you can say so much in one word? Few things in life can be done like that. Amazon.com screwed up, which is pretty weird to me given how many people mantain and check for errors. Oops! Besides, it's pretty bad a bunch of fanboys can crash a site that should be able to resist traffic spikes. So not only was my point valid, it generated interesting conversation. apparently that deserves a 0.

Re:Heh.

[omeomi]

Is it just me, or is the first year I've really noticed any sort of competitive pricing on game systems. Generally it hasn't mattered too much where you bought your game system, because they were pretty much exactly the same price wherever you looked. But this year, I got an ad for a $100 rebate on an XBox360 from MicroCenter, and now this stunt by Amazon...

...wish I'd gotten one...

Re:

[superpulpsicle]

But look at the people's responses. A ton of people are saying it was a lie. There never was any Xbox systems at that price to begin with. It was a fake promotion? Evil Amazon??

Re:Heh.

[cowscows]

Only a retard would say that. It would make no sense at all for Amazon to fake it. Let's say they lost $200 per xbox selling them in this promotion. With 1000 boxes for sale, that's $200,000. A good chunk of change, no doubt, but not really difficult to come by for a company with a market value in the billions of dollars. They've gotten a ton of press out of it, and all for a fraction of the cost of a 30 second superbowl ad.

Sure, they could've faked it, and then just relied on an overloaded website to avoid having to give out any real deals, but why would they want to have to deal with the potential PR problems if that truth got out? It would be beyond foolish for this to have all been a scam.

30 seconds at ground zero

[darkonc]

Think about it: at 35 transactions per second, it would take them all of 30 seconds to sell out of $100 X-Boxes -- and given that they had enough traffic to bring down the site, I'm sure that they were running X-Box transactions about as fast as the deadlock-resolution code could handle.

Now, why whould they do this?

If they got a couple million people on their site as a result of this insanity, they only need to get about $0.10 per customer to make up for what they lost on the promotion. Well worth the m

Re:

[DeadBugs]

It's less competitive pricing and more "bait and switch". They are sold out of what you want, but since you are here why not look at all our other crap.

Re:

[davco9200]

I completely agree -- according to the Wikipedia entry for "bait and switch" [wikipedia.org], it matches almost exactly:
A bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the fraudster lures in customers by advertising a good at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute good is. The goal of the bait-and-switch is to convince some buyers to purchase the substitute good as a means of avoiding disappointment over not getting the bait, or as a way

Re:Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't turn out so well for Amazon when their site went down for hours.

Hours? All 0.25 of them, you mean? I mean holy shit, it says 'About 15 minutes' right there in the blurb.