The consequences of this week's Amazon outage

During the outage, Apica, an independent third-party website testing, optimisation and monitoring company for mobile and online business performance, monitored the top 100 internet retailer sites and noted the following stats.

Key findings:

• 54 out of the top 100 internet retailers were affected, with a decrease of 20% or greater in performance
  
• 3 websites went down completely Express, Lulu Lemon, One Kings Lane
  
• Average website load time went from a few seconds to greater than 30 seconds to load

Top online websites load times increased by triple digits:

• Disney Store - 1165% slower
  
• Target - 991% slower
  
• Nike - 642% slower
  
• Nordstrom - 592% slower
  
• Victoria Secret - 353% slower

Yet Apple, Walmart, Newegg, Bestbuy, Costco and, surprisingly, Amazon/Zappos were not affected by the outage.

Snapshot image of performance before and during the attack on the Disney store.

Catching outages is difficult and almost uncontrollable, but implementing performance can pinpoint whether images, video, third party or servers go down. Some of the companies above were able to spot-check and evaluate the performance of their site while down. This helped them generate a work-around or quickly use images from the local server.

For marketers, degradation in website performance means lost revenue. It is as simple as that. Consumers are very sensitive to how web pages perform. 34% of consumers say they would abandon a website that takes over 10 seconds to load. During the Amazon outage, some of the world’s largest sites took over 30 seconds to fully load their home pages.

It is critical that marketing and technical teams work together to develop a contingency plan for when a third-party provider goes down. One of the dangers of moving to the cloud is an overreliance on a single cloud vendor. Companies can deploy a multi-cloud strategy to mitigate issues when one or more of their vendors have an outage.

When the inevitable outage happens, marketing teams should have a communication plan in place for their visitors and customers. They need to promptly communicate when and why service degradation occurs and what steps are being taken to resolve it.

Beyond the obvious revenue impact of an outage, a company can suffer irreparable harm to their brand. The way a company responds to an outage can greatly influence how much consumers trust the brand. For example, the tech community generally viewed Amazon’s response to the outage as unsatisfactory. Their status pages showed green lights for services that had been experiencing major issues for over an hour. While a company like Heroku, which heavily relies on Amazon services, was praised for how quickly and transparently it responded to the outage.

Brands need to be proactively monitoring their website from an end-user perspective. If they quickly discover the problem, they can take steps to mitigate the impact. A company can deploy a multi-cloud strategy and shift traffic away from vendors that are experiencing issues.

Another key point is the need for a crisis communication plan. By proactively communicating when and why an outage occurs and what mitigating steps are being taken, a brand can come out stronger after an outage. If a problem happens, a quick response, clear communication, and transparency can increase the trustworthiness of a brand in the eye of consumers.