Amazon ‘missed out on $34m in sales during internet outage’

The e-commerce giant generates $9,615 in sales per second – but not when it’s website is down

Out of pocket: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (AP)

In the 59 minutes that a number of major websites were down on Tuesday, Amazon missed out on an estimated $34m in sales.

Amazon, which has enjoyed a boom during the pandemic as retailers have been forced to shut their doors, generated sales of $75.6bn through its websites in the first three months of the year.

That equates to an average of $830m a day, $9,615 a second – or $34m during Monday's 59-minute outage.

Amazon, Reddit, Twitch and PayPal were among sites that went down after service provider Fastly experienced problems which began at 9:58am UTC. Fastly updated its status page at 10:44am, saying that the issue “has been identified and a fix is being implemented”. By 10:57am it reported the fix had been applied.

The blip is unlikely to cause a dent in the $186bn fortune of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Amazon’s shoppers may continue to make their purchases now that sites are back up and running, but the figures are an indication of the company’s dominance.

It is not the first time Amazon’s website has been out of action. In November 2020, the Amazon Web Services platform, which provides cloud computing, went down, resulting in similar problems.

The disruption to some of the world’s most important websites again highlighted the internet’s reliance on a relatively small number of companies.