If you were one of millions who sat down after Christmas Eve dinner to curl up with a good movie on Netflix, you may well have been disappointed; and not just because Dark Knight Rising wasn't listed in the new releases.
Netflix suffered an unfortunately timed outage lasting about seven-and-a-half hours Monday night, causing more people to spend quality time actually talking to their relatives. Red-faced Netflix issued an apology, although it blamed the outage on technical troubles its service provider Amazon  was having.
Terrible Timing
"We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage and we're aware that many of you are having trouble streaming," the company posted on its Facebook page Monday. "Our teams are working hard along with Amazon Web Services to address the issue, and we hope to be back up as quickly as possible. Stay tuned for an update once the problem has been resolved."
The company even acknowledged the "terrible timing" in a tweet at 4:25 p.m. on Dec. 24, promising that engineers were hard at work on the problem.
That was followed on Christmas afternoon with a "huge thanks to members for being patient. You should now be able to stream Netflix as you normally do. We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday."
Behind the Scenes
The trouble wasn't the fault of the Los Gatos, Calif.-based video-rental giant, which had 26 million subscribers as of the middle of last year. Netflix uses Amazon's Web Services (AWS ), based in northern Virginia, for streaming, and attributed the difficulty to Amazon.
In its status dashboard on Monday at 3:15 p.m. Pacific time, Amazon reported about its CloudSearch service: "Creating new domains and indexing operations are unavailable in us-east-1. Existing search domains continue to serve search queries."
Earlier, at 1:50 p.m. Pacific time, AWS reported this about its Elastic Load Balancer service: "We are investigating increased error rates for Elastic Load Balancing API calls in the US-EAST-1 region. This issue does not affect traffic on running load balancers, but the API may report that instances are out of service for some calls."
There was also an issue with the 'Elastic Beanstalk' system. All issues were resolved by the next morning.
In response to our request for comment, Amazon provided the following statement: "On December 24, AWS experienced issues with the Elastic Load Balancing service that impacted some customers in the US-EAST region. Impacted customers started to recover the evening of December 24 and the service was fully recovered and functioning correctly on December 25. " (continued...)
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