Netflix Streaming Is Down: Christmas Eve Outage

If you wanted to stream a holiday-themed movie to your TV on Christmas Eve and watch it with your family, you may be out of luck if you’re a Netflix subscriber.

Direct-to-TV online streaming on Netflix is apparently down, although the service seems to be working for computers and tablet devices.  On its Netflixhelps Twitter feed, the company says “we’re aware that some members are experiencing issues streaming movies and TV shows. We’re working to resolve the problem.” There has be no recent updates however.

The problem in streaming movies to your TV may involve Amazon Web Services according to the Endgaget website:

“Has an evening with National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation become an annual holiday tradition? Or perhaps you enjoy a pre-present thrill, courtesy of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Whatever the flick, there’s a good chance you won’t be watching it on Netflix Instant Streaming tonight, reportedly due to an outage over at Amazon Web Services. Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockroft is on the case, explaining on Twitter that the interruption will affect only certain devices — while we’re not quite sure which gadgets are currently down, we have received reports that gaming consoles and connected TVs have gone offline.”

The Verge suggests that the issue may be with the AWS center in Northern Virginia.

Netflix US sent out this tweet at 7:25 pm Eastern time tonight:

We’re sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @netflixhelps for updates.

— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012

Are you a Netflix subscriber that is currently affected by the instant streaming service going offline?

Update: Netflix (@Netflixhelps) is tweeting that “we’re working hard with Amazon AWS engineers to restore streaming soon.”