If I told you that Google, Netflix, Facebook and Amazon earned quite a lot of money, you probably wouldn’t be all too surprised. After all, these vast tech giants have been the major players of the internet for decades. Facebook, as a quick example, generated an impressive 9.32 billion dollars in revenue last quarter (that’s only three months’ worth of uptime). As you can very well imagine, these tech giants have a huge dependence on the internet. For these organisations, ensuring their websites are kept live and fully functional at all times is of the upmost importance.
Unfortunately, lengthy downtime and major website faults do happen. In the past, there have been many instances where huge organisations fell victim to damaging technical issues or the havoc wreaked by hackers.
Some instances include:
· In February of 2000, a series of DoS (Denial-of-Service) attacks flooded major commercial websites with a large volume of traffic, causing the collapse of Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, CNN, and many others. The hacker behind this event was Canadian high school student Michael Calce, dubbed “MafiaBoy”.
· Facebook experienced a 30-minute sitewide outage in 2014, costing them half a million dollars. This incident saw Facebook’s stock plummet by approximately 0.8%, and there was a sharp increase in traffic on Twitter.
· In March of this year, a large number of sites were crippled for four hours when AWS (Amazon Web Services) went down due to a single employee’s error. One estimation from AXIOS claims that this incident cost upwards of $150 million for the companies and services involved.
Here at Jolt, we have taken the most recent quarterly income reports for fiscal year 2017 and calculated exactly how much these tech giants are really making (that’s Alphabet Inc., Apple, eBay, Twitter Google, Netflix, Facebook and Amazon,).
Not only have we considered how much these tech giants are earning in revenue per day and second, but the amount they’d stand to lose if faced with a 5-minute sitewide outage. (“Outage” here assumes the website and all services are completely non-functional.) To top it off, we have considered what could have been purchased with all the “lost” cash (to further emphasise the impressive amounts they earn). From first-class round trips from London to Honolulu, Hawaii, multiple trips around the globe, expensive sports cars and some of the most expensive luxury suites in the world. Check out the visual below for a taste of some bitter outage outrage!
Some of our findings are below:
· Alphabet Inc. makes $3246 per second in revenue, and would lose $973,756 if services ceased for 5 minutes. (Enough to book 116 first-class round trips from London to Honolulu, Hawaii.)
· Apple makes $9645 per second in revenue, and would lose $2.9 million if services ceased for 5 minutes. (Enough to buy a Pagani Huayra BC sports car.)
In all, Google, Netflix, Facebook and Amazon lose a lot of cash for every outage but Apple is by far the biggest loser of the group - which is surprising since a lot of revenue comes from hardware as opposed to lets say Netflix or Facebook.
You can view the full data visualisation here