Amazon Lost $120K a Minute During Outage

Amazon was down for as long as 45 minutes in the US and Canada yesterday, VentureBeat reports, and while the cause isn't clear, the company certainly lost a lot of money while it was offline. Reports differ on how long the site was down (Reuters says 15 minutes; GigaOm says about 45). Geekwire puts the outage at 40 minutes, and figures that Amazon missed out on a whopping $4.8 million in sales, based on $15.7 billion in revenue last quarter—or $120,000 per minute. That's roughly in line with what Google's outage on Friday cost it, VentureBeat notes: some $545,000 in ad revenue in about five minutes. (More Amazon stories.)