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Ask HN: Why isn't Amazon.com impacted by AWS outages?

5 points by trevoragilbert ↗ HN
I've noticed over the years whenever there's an AWS outage, Amazon.com doesn't seem to be impacted. My assumption is that they'd be one of the first to go down. Any idea why?

11 comments

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walterbell
Some functions were down, e.g. order history.
PaulHoule
I was having trouble with the store this morning.
ibejoeb
No idea if it's related, but this is the first time I've seen "We're sorry, Customer Service chat and phone lines are not currently available at the moment."

I've been getting message all morning about delivery delays. All were supposed to be delivered today and now they're anywhere between tomorrow and thursday.

runjake
It was impacted. Amazon.com was unusable for me this morning. All I could get loaded was the header section and a blank page saying "Something went wrong."
VirusNewbie
I can't get any filtering functionality right now. The question isn't "why wasn't it impacted" and more like, why is it still degraded?
Showfom
It really depends on which data center you're connecting to, a few regions in the US were impacted earlier this morning.
JustExAWS
Source: Former AWS employee. For the most part Amazon Retail doesn’t run on AWS infrastructure and doesn’t use AWS services. I’m simplifying a little bit. But Amazon (the company) runs two sets of infrastructure “AWS” and “CDO” (or COE I don’t remember).

It’s an old wives tale that AWS came out of “excess capacity” from Amazon Retail.