Netflix users were most likely about to settle down with their snacks and cold beverages and watch a movie on Christmas Eve, when they discovered the site had crashed.
The online entertainment streaming service tried blaming the outage on Amazon.com — the number one online retailer — and their “Cloud,” an internet hard drive if you will.
Neither AWS or Netflix have released a detailed report on what actually happened, but evidence has it that it was the elastic load balancers at the Virginia data center that somehow tripped up and led to significant traffic loss for Netflix viewers trying to watch Christmas movies, says ReadWrite.com .
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
The outage continued into Christmas morning for some customers. The company tweeted on its Netflix US account at 8:45 am PT that the service was “back to normal streaming levels.”
Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We’re back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday.
— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012
The problem with Netflix’s claim was that several people actually using Amazon’s streaming video service reported no problems whatsoever. It does seem odd that Netflix hosts its service on a competitor’s servers, and when it goes down, they just fall back on the scapegoat method.
In the end, no one is officially accusing Amazon’s business units of collaborating to bring down Netflix.
Thanks to @ netflix outage we can likely expect a moderate population explosion in nine months.
— Joel Braverman (@joelbrave) December 25, 2012
The highway analogy applies, in that AWS is the highway, a shining ribbon of concrete, on-ramps and bridges that enable vehicles to travel from point to point. Most of the time, the highway’s operations run smoothly. But when the highway is messed with, problems will arise, no matter how good the infrastructure is.
Why, after getting booted this summer, didn’t Netflix make sure this wouldn’t happen again?
