April 27, 2011
by Eran Davidov
On April 21st, a massive failure in an Amazon hosting facility in North Virgina caused multiple websites to stop working. While basic email and communications tools kept working, a lot of services stopped. The Internet took a day-off, like an employee who will answer the phone if needed, but won’t work on those files you need by 5p tonight for the meeting with that client.
Researchers at Matzutz MehaEtzba university have been pouring at financial data that is available from that day and have come to some interesting conclusions. “Because each site came back up at a different time,” says Dr. Lo Kayam, “we can separate the impact each has on America’s workforce.”
Dr. Lo and his team have not disclosed their full findings as yet, but have shared a few tidbits about how our browsing behavior impacts productivity. Reddit.com seems to have had the most direct impact on workforce productivity. Work was completed 40% faster once users accepted that the site was in read-only mode and there was nothing new to read and no way to comment about it.
The researchers also found that people tended to move around less during the outage at FourSquare, since they were not able to check-in and there was no other reason for them to switch Cafes nor a way to claim mayorships. Another theory advanced by the team is that the minor drop in body weight across the US that day is due to users unable to access their Lifesta accounts to get deals, and with no way to access BiteHunter to find out which restaurants wanted them around today.
“Our biggest surprise,” says Dr. Bab Lat, a colleague of Dr. Lo’s. “was that unlike other groups, the investor community actually stopped working while Quora was down. Apparently being unable to get in touch with the herd delayed investment decisions.”
The team plans on publishing the full results of the survey later this year, so long as their computers don’t crash. “We’ll probably recommend that each person carry a backup Internet, ” says Dr. Lo. “People were unable to cope with the lack of online connectivity and we’re seeing the beginning of a new syndrom, Disconectphobia, the fear of being offline.”
