The folks at Netflix are pointing the finger of blame directly at Amazon Web Services’ cloud computing center in Virginia for the outage on Christmas Eve.
The problem couldn’t have arrived at a more inopportune moment for the company. As countless individuals were firing up their Netflix accounts for the first time — my parents included — the popular streaming service essentially went belly up.
According to the Bloomberg , Netflix spokesman Joris Evers explained that an outage at Amazon Web Services was the culprit behind the holiday snafu. Over 30 million people across the United States, Canada, and Latin America were without content for nearly 10 hours.
While Netflix is certainly unhappy that its customers were without service for such a lengthy period of time, Evers said the company is excited that so many people were signing up this holiday season.
The representative said in a statement:
“We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented. 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.”
Reuters reports that Amazon Web Services experienced a similar outage in April of last year. Websites such as Reddit and Foursquare were knocked offline when the cloud computing center suddenly went down.
Given that a flood of classic Disney movies recently made their way onto the streaming service, chances are parents were trying to find something for their children to do when Amazon temporarily bit the dust. The Inquisitr reported that technicians worked hard on the day before Christmas to get Netflix streaming back in working order.
Although Netflix is blaming Amazon Web Services for the holiday headache, Amazon has yet to issue an official statement on the outage. Evers also refused to discuss the contracts the streaming service has with its competitor.
