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Netflix suffers Christmas Eve outage, points to Amazon

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A sign is shown at the headquarters of Netflix in Los Gatos, California September 20, 2011. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

A sign is shown at the headquarters of Netflix in Los Gatos, California September 20, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Robert Galbraith

NEW YORK | Tue Dec 25, 2012 2:13pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.'s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.

The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles such as Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray players.

Evers said that the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia, and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users late on Monday.

"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers 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.

An outage at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare in April of last year.

Amazon Web Services was not immediately available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company's contracts with Amazon.

(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
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Comments (1)
MTterb wrote:
I’m crying tears! The people have had to go a couple of days without watching a movie! Does anyone even know what a book is anymore. It’s that thing that used to entertain use before the Internet. I am nearly out of debt and I still have no ambition to pay money, month after month, for something I can get at the pawn shop in a month or so for the same amount of money it costs me each month as a service.

Dec 26, 2012 11:06am EST  --  Report as abuse
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