The end result, as you may have guessed, was a 15-20min self-inflicted Denial Of Service attack. Most people couldn't even get a page to show up for 10-15min. Given that Amazon has probably the biggest e-commerce infrastructure in the world (even if it is based on an ancient IIS ISAPI DLL ;-), this is clearly pathetic performance, which begs the question: is any e-commerce site able to survive having millions of people in virtual "line" at their doors? :-P
It's definitely a clever way to test out your infrastructure to see what the weak points are. I just hope Amazon is willing to share the results with us...