Amazon crash could cost company $5 million
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos
SEATTLE -- Amazon.com's website crashed today for just 30 minutes. But that relatively short outage could end up costing the Seattle Internet giant as much as $5 million in lost sales, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.
The newspaper bases that figure on estimates that Amazon takes in nearly $10,000 every five seconds. The widespread outage started around noon. What caused it is still unknown. Amazon is the world's largest online retailer.
The outage didn't affect Amazon's cloud services, which are used by many other websites and companies around the world.