An outage at one of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s web service centers affected users of Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX)’s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not completely resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.
Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, were hit by the disruption. Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers said the problem also affected various devices that allows users stream movies and T.V. shows from home. The devices affected range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlatStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.
Evers said the problem was the outcome of an outage at an Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services’ cloud computing center in Virginia, and took place at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully enlivened before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday morning, even though streaming was accessible for most users by 11:00 p.m. PST on Monday.
“Netflix is down for some customers this Christmas Eve, thanks to an outage of some of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure,” the company said on its Twitter account.
On the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard, the company said it was suffering from issues with its cloud-based search, load balancing, and software management services. Some customers are “experiencing significant levels of traffic loss,” Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) said.
Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), established in Los Gatos, California, has 30 million streaming subscribers globally, out of which more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was affected by the outage and could have also been affected, Evers said.
This event is the most recent in a sequence of outages from Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services, with one stirring in April of last year that affected sites like Reddit and Foursquare. The Amazon Web Services issue was at least the third major outage for Amazon Web Services this year. Amazon provides online video and Prime Instant Video services to members of its free-shipping program that is competing with Netflix’s video service.
“We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented,” Evers of Netflix said. “We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night,” he added.
Cloud Architect of Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) said that not all the devices were affected by the outage. “Some devices working, others not,” he said on his Twitter account. “Still waiting for AWS to fix it”.
