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Blog: Internet Amazon Web Services Failure Leads to Netflix Outage on Christmas Eve
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - December 27, 2012 8:00 AM

5 comment(s) - last by SAN-Man.. on Jan 1 at 1:24 PM

Netflix customers left unable stream on Christmas Eve

Netflix subscribers who sat down to watch streaming movies on Christmas Eve and early Christmas morning were met with a Netflix outage. Netflix is now saying that the outage wasn't its fault -- Amazon’s Web Service Centers failed, leading to the outage of the Netflix streaming service across Canada, Latin America, and the United States.

Netflix spokesman Joris Evers offered a statement saying that the outage was caused by an outage at the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing center located in Virginia. Netflix says the outage started at about 12:30 PM PST on Monday and was fully restored to before 8 AM PST on Tuesday morning. While Netflix says that the outage was restored by 8 AM PST on Christmas day, streaming was available again for many users by 11 PM PST on Monday.

"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.

Amazon has offered no official comment on the outage at this time. Interestingly, Amazon's own streaming video service was unaffected.

Source: Reuters

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Shouldn't Clouds Prevent Outages

By RufusM on 12/27/2012 5:19:50 PM , Rating: 5

I know everything isn't bulletproof, but I would be interested to hear what the problem was that caused the outage.

Amazon has AWS data centers across the nation in various locations. Isn't the point of using AWS to take advantage of the distributed infrastructure and prevent outages. Netflix is blaming AWS so I assume it's not a Netflix application problem. Isn't it reasonable to think AWS's fail-over tech should be better or is this a problem at such a scale it can't be distributed very well?

RE: Shouldn't Clouds Prevent Outages

By Trisped on 12/28/2012 6:39:25 PM , Rating: 2

I thought their "Chaos Monkey" was suppose to prevent things like this?

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012...

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RE: Shouldn't Clouds Prevent Outages

By Trisped on 12/28/2012 6:41:52 PM , Rating: 2

Sorry, help them program to avoid issues like service outages when a cloud host goes down.

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RE: Shouldn't Clouds Prevent Outages

By SAN-Man on 1/1/2013 1:24:39 PM , Rating: 2

Amazon has servers all over but if Netflix doesn't set up their services to be redundant that isn't Amazon's fault.

I deal with this all the time in my industry, customers have servers in multiple offices but simply having the hardware isn't enough, your services have to be distributed to utilize the hardware.

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I think it's funny that...

By PitViper007 on 12/31/2012 10:51:30 AM , Rating: 2

Netflix on Amazon's servers went down, but Amazon Prime stayed up and running. Since I don't have cable anymore and use only streaming, I knew when Netflix went down. Not knowing what the problem was, I switched over to Amazon Prime and saw that it WAS working.