February 7, 2000

7:02 PM

Do you, a, have problems getting to Yahoo? Yahoo was unreachable for much of the morning, and it turns out that it was apparently due to hackers. I saw estimates that the loss of 3 hours worth of traffic meant about 58 million lost page views. How many dollars is that?
posted by mathowie (3 comments total)

Industry Standard included in their report of the outage that the DOS attack ocurred on the same day a BOF session on DOS attacks was being held in San Jose (they quoted Russ Cooper, editor of NTBugTraq).
posted by tomalak at 7:24 PM on February 7, 2000

Well, the "reports" that it could be worth millions probably take into account the fact that people will become disloyal with the brand, etc. etc.

In true wampum, they actually only lost about $120,000 in advertising revenue: ~$26k/hour * 3 hour downtime + extra for it being at a peak usage hour. (based on their November Quarterly report). So spin-control will be the only problem.

Oddly enough, over 3/4 of Yahoo!'s quarterly income is from investments.
posted by othermatt at 7:25 PM on February 7, 2000

I don't think you wanna be caught if you caused a company $120,000.
posted by Mark at 7:41 PM on February 7, 2000