Christmas Eve movie streaming was a little bumpy for some Netflix customers, thanks to an outage at Amazon’s North Virginia data centers.
The problems started at about 12:30 p.m. Pacific, and it didn’t take long for customers to start reporting downtime with Netflix’s streaming video service.
At 9:30 p.m. a Netflix spokesman reported that the issue affects “some, but not all devices that can stream from Netflix.”
“Our teams are working hard with Amazon Web Services to address the issue and hope to have streaming available for everyone again soon,” he said via text message.
Cloud computing services like Amazon’s promise to take some of the pain out of computing by selling customers like Netflix time on their servers. The idea is that Amazon’s seasoned engineers manage the servers and ensure that they never go down. So any kind of high-profile outage is a big embarrassment for the company.
This is the third time this year that an Amazon outage has caused problems for Netflix, which is the most prominent user of Amazon’s cloud-based computing services.
Christmas Eve is a big movie-watching night, so while it’s not clear how many Netflix customers were affected, Tuesday’s outage came at a bad time.
“It’s been hours & it’s Christmas Eve. It’s classic movie night!!!” wrote one Netflix user on Twitter.
Late Tuesday, an Amazon spokeswoman confirmed that her company was still working to resolve the problems.
On the Amazon Web Services Service Health Dashboard, the company said it was experiencing problems with its cloud-based search, load balancing, and software management services. Some customers are “experiencing significant levels of traffic loss,” Amazon said.
Heroku, another cloud-based service for software developers, said it was having problems too, thanks to the Amazon outage.
This story has been updated to include comment from Netflix
Photo: Gabrielle McMillan
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