Goodreads Gone (for the Day)

Amazon’s behemoth AWS hosting service had a massive outage today. While the disruption, no doubt, was not caused by traffic to Amazon’s oft-neglected Goodreads subsidiary, that was how I first noticed something was wrong. After initially speculating this hiccup was due to Amazon’s apparent operation of the site on 2013 infrastructure (the year they acquired the company), I opined, “Books are, for Amazon, like a junior high crush—long ago dismissed and taken for granted; nothing left but a sliver of nostalgia after they moved on to bigger things.”

Turns out, Amazon had bigger fish to fry, but it got me wondering what the reaction was to Goodreads specifically in the corridors of the world’s fifth largest company. So, I give you this…

Top 10 Things Heard at Amazon When Goodreads Went Down Today

10) What's Goodreads?

9) Finally, we can retire the Commodore 64 running the site.

8) Does anyone know the password to the @goodreads Twitter account?

7) Does anyone know the password to reboot goodreads.com?

6) Shhh... maybe no one will notice.

5) At least we won't need to give Jeanine Cummins the Goodreads Choice Award.

4) Good! Now they can just buy books on Amazon instead of blabbing on about them.

3) Is that Gwyneth Paltrow’s thing?

2) People still read books?

1) That’s more revenue lost than we made all last minute.