Netflix Outage: Netflix Apologizes for Christmas Eve Outage

Culture

Netflix, the Los Gatos, California-based provider of by-mail and online streaming media and entertainment left millions of families in the United States unable to watch some of the most beloved holiday classics on Christmas Eve due to an outage the company has since apologized for and blamed on Amazon. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, Netflix said on its Twitter page that the "terribly-timed" outage was caused by "some of Amazon's cloud infrastructure," and that it was working with Amazon engineers to restore the service.

Meanwhile, Amazon acknowledged there were problems with its Northern Virginia region.

"We are working to resolve issues with the service," said an Amazon spokeswoman, according to the WSJ.

Amazon's Web service, known as AWS, operates server systems that deliver internet service for many companies, including Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram and Foursquare.

The Netflix Christmas Eve outage highlights the problem for these companies as they have to rely on Amazon's AWS. It is not the first time this year than these website's services have been interrupted by these kind of outages. 

However, according to Netflix's cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, not all customer devices were affected by the outage.

"Some devices working, others not," he said on his Twitter account. "Still waiting for AWS to fix it."

Read on the WSJ