AWS caused quite a disruption this week to the internet connection of certain sites and apps. How did this happen? Human error – an Amazon engineer incorrectly inputted a command when shutting down storage sub-systems, meaning AWS S3 storage wasn’t able to service any requests. Popular sites like Trello, Medium, Slack and Quora stopped working and people started freaking out.
We recently moved our proprietary CRM and website to AWS, however, kept live backups elsewhere. If you’re running big-data, we would recommend doing the same! Don’t be victim of the next AWS Reliance Awareness Day.
In new listings, this week we listed an affiliate business available in health and wellness that gained 7.7 million pages over the last 12 months. If you’re not already on our buyer’s list, fill out this investor form to get access to this and more listings.
What’s coming up in events? Founder Thomas Smale will be speaking at The Sellers’ Conference in Philly next week about “How to Plan for a Winning Exit With Your E-Commerce Business“, before heading to Traffic & Conversion Summit with CEO Ismael Wrixen in San Diego from April 9th – 12th. Let us know if you’re attending either event and we’ll connect you directly to Thomas and Ismael to meet. Thomas will also be featured in two webinars in the upcoming weeks hosted by the SaaS Growth Hacks and The Startup Chat Facebook Group. Stay tuned for the details.
Keep reading to learn more about this week’s AWS break down, opening day for Snap on the NYSE and saying goodbye to Skype WiFi in the briefs below.
Deal Highlights
Affiliate – Health & Wellness – $26K net/mo
- 7.7 million page views in the trailing twelve-months
- 420K average monthly visitors
- 112K keyword rankings
- 98% net margins
- Outsourced content creation with low owner involvement
Yearly Net Profit: $312K
Asking Price: $640K
Sold:
Display Advertising – Personal Development – $1.6K net/mo
Affiliate – Fitness – $700 gross/mo
In the News…
AWS Breaks Down
On Monday, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) went down for a couple of hours. The engineering team was attempting to fix a bug causing the S3 billing system to be a lot slower than expected. As mentioned above, instead of removing a small set of subsystems, a larger system was removed. This also removed certain functions that allow the entire system to operate correctly, debilitating S3 from processing requests. Amazon Web Services that depend on S3 for storage, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Stores (EBS), and AWS Lambda were affected.
Amazon released a statement on the exact events that took place from the root of the problem and what they plan to prevent this from happening in the future. From a technical perspective, Amazon will be making modifications to the tool that allowed the removal of such a large portion of the server, in addition to adding safety checks.
To read Amazon’s full message read here.
NYSE Welcomes “SNAP”
This week, Snap shares opened for its first day of trading on the NYSE. The company had priced its 200 million share at $17, which traded over 40% at $24. Within the first 30 minutes of trading, 100 million shares were exchanged. With an opening price of $24, this makes Snap’s market cap at $33 billion, while it takes home $3.4 billion.
Snapchat’s value is largely established from its current portfolio of acquisitions that makes Snapchat’s product advanced and valuable. The acquisition of Looksery powers Snapchat’s current selfie lenses via augmented reality masks, Bitstrips enables the integration of Bitmojis in snaps, Vergence Labs was transformed to make Spectacles, and there are other apps parented by Snapchat that make it what it is today.
Going public also allows Snap to dive into more prestigious investments. Now that Snap has entered the M&A game, it’ll be interesting to see if it tries to pick up any major tech players.
Skype WiFi Retires
End of March, Skype users will no longer be able to use Skype WiFi. Microsft is making the decision to discontinue the application after March 31. Skype Credit will still be applicable to calling mobile phones and landlines. However, Skype WiFi will no longer be able to be downloaded or found after its discontinued date.
Skype’s vague message to the public about why they are retiring the app states, “we’re retiring Skype WiFi globally so we can better focus our efforts on bringing you the best possible experience through our core Skype features.”
If you have any further questions on your remaining Skype Credit use please visit Skype Support.