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 like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD
players.
Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos,
California, has 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide, of which
more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the
outage and could have potentially been affected, Evers said.
Evers said 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 before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday
morning, although streaming was available for most users by 11:00 p.m.
PST on Monday.
The event marks the latest in a series of
outages from Amazon Web Services, with one occurring in April of last
year that knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare.
"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers of Netflix 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.
Officials at Amazon
Web Services were not available for comment. Evers, the Netflix
spokesman, declined to comment on the company's contracts with Amazon.
© Thomson Reuters 2012