AfterDawn: News

Amazon gives technical report on why Netflix was down on Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve, Netflix fans were met with bad news; their streaming service was not available to them.

The issue was thanks to Amazon Web Services, which is the massive cloud hosting service that has had a rough year.



This week, Amazon issued a technical explanation and a lengthy apology for the downtime, although they did not mention their rival by name at any point.

What started the issues was a human error; basically an employee accidentally deleted vital data: "We want to apologize. We know how critical our services are to our customers' businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement in the ELB service."

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said the company will be fully hosted by Amazon Web Services by the end of 2013, making them the biggest customers for Amazon. Not sure this is too great of a start.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 31 Dec 2012 21:07

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• 4 comments

• Darney53

  Well I really missed the service being down Christmas Eve. Hope it wont happen again.

  4.1.2013 11:15 #1

• bratcher

  Well I didn't watch Netflix streaming on Christmas eve or Christmas day so I had no idea that the service was out until I read this article about it. But I'm very glad thats it's back up now.

  4.1.2013 11:50 #2

• Gnawnivek

  "Deleted vital data" hmmmm...

  4.1.2013 13:30 #3

• phobet

  It sounds like Amazon needs to deploy better controls on their network. It doesn't bode well for them if a single point of failure is an employee that fat fingers "vital data", and it takes them all day to figure this out, and fix it.

  27.1.2013 15:32 #4