Amazon.com is dead!

Rob Rosenberger, Vmyths co-founder
Sunday, 9 June 2002 THE HEADLINE OF this column says it all. Amazon.com bit the dust at approximately 12:10am CT. It's nothing but a closed home page. I took a snapshot of it for posterity.

Amazon.com died at approximately 12:10am CT on 9 Jun 02. We'll have to go back to the ancient physical ritual of driving to malls...

Don't let the "temporarily closed" notice fool you. A 24/7/365 website like Amazon.com doesn't need to close. That's why they call it "24/7/365," you know. In fact it was still down as of 12:31am. Only a diabolical hacker could have possibly done this. It's over, folks. Hackers finally made good on their threats to destroy e-commerce. You might as well set the controls for the heart of the sun and kiss it all goodbye. We'll have to go back to the ancient physical ritual of driving to malls. Oh, waitaminit! I hit the refresh button at 12:55am and the website came back up. Maybe Amazon.com did take their servers offline for something like preventive maintenance or hardware/software upgrades. Nevermind. Hmmm. I wonder if Michael Erbschloe can calculate how many billions of dollars they lost during their downtime? I mean, it can't be as much as the beating they took when a 14yr-old destroyed Amazon.com in 2000...