Netflix Blames Amazon For Christmas Outage

Amazon's streaming service unaffected

If you are a Netflix subscriber, you probably noticed that the streaming video service had a number of holiday films and cartoons among its options for viewing. If your Christmas Eve and Christmas Day plans involved sitting down in front of the TV and streaming some of those holiday movies, odds are you were disappointed. Netflix had a significant outage on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that took the streaming service off-line.

The problem wasn't on Netflix's end; rather the problem had to do with Amazon Web Services Elastic Load Balancing service in the US-East data center. The problem with Amazon service led to Netflix and streaming service Heroku being off-line Christmas Eve and the outage continued into the next day. Interestingly, Amazon's own video streaming service Amazon Prime Instant Video was apparently unaffected in most locations.