Are there well-known examples of web products that were killed by slow service?

Posted by Jeremy Wadhams on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Jeremy Wadhams
Published on 2012-09-20T22:34:19Z Indexed on 2012/09/21 3:49 UTC
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usability

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speed

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latency

It's a basic tenet of UX design that users prefer fast pages.

It's supposedly even baked into Google's ranking algorithm now: fast sites rank higher, all else being equal.

But are there well known examples of web services where the popular narrative is "it was great, but it was so slow people took their money elsewhere"?

I can pretty easily think of example problems with scale (Twitter's fail whale) or reliability (Netflix and Pinterest outages caused by a single datacenter in a storm). But can (lack of) speed really kill?

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