Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Issues Official Apology To Netflix, Inc. (NFLX)

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Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has officially issued an apology to Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) for the outage that crippled the video service on Christmas Eve. Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) users in the U.S., Latin America and Canada were unable to access the services. It affected devices that stream videos, including the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii.

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Issues Official Apology To Netflix, Inc. (NFLX)

As reported by ValueWalk last week, the outage affected Netflix’s streaming video service and other users of Amazon Web Services for several hours. Amazon Web Services offers business services like cloud-based storage and processing. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) does offer its own video streaming services which compete with Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX)’s services, although it  says Amazon Web Services is operated as a separate entity.

Today Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) issued a statement explaining the problem, saying it was caused by a developer client who accidentally deleted some important data. Amazon said it did make adjustments to its system so that the problem will be unlikely to happen again, and if it does, recovery will be faster.

In its statement, Amazon said, “We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses, and we know the disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers.”

At this point we don’t know what effect, if any, that outage will have on Amazon’s business, especially related to Amazon Web Services. We won’t know until the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report, which is due out in the latter half of January. MarketWatch reports that Amazon Web Services was about 4 percent of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s revenue for the previous three quarters, an increase of about 3.5 percent from last year.

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