Netflix Video Streaming Service Back online – Outage on Christmas Eve Blamed on Amazon

Netflix Video Streaming Service Back online - Outage on Christmas Eve Blamed on AmazonFor those who may have opened their Christmas presents early on Christmas Eve, an outage of service at Netflix may have created disappointment. According to news reports from Reuters, the popular video streaming service was down on Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day as the result of an outage at one of Amazon’s web service centers.

While the current status indicates that the Netflix streaming network is now back online, the outage was a frustrating letdown for subscribers some of whom were perhaps logging into Netflix for the first time. Had the outage occurred a day later, it could have really created an issue for new subscribers.

With a substantial holiday promotional push, Netflix had potentially added a lot of new subscribers to their network. To that, consider the number of individuals who had just unwrapped Netflix video streaming devices such as HDTVs, tablets like the Amazon Kindle, Blu-ray and DVD players, video game consoles like the Wii, Playstation and XBOX, and other devices, who would have been selecting from a number of video streaming services. An outage of Netflix on Christmas could have pushed a substantial number of potential Netflix customers to their competition.

The Netflix outage reportedly affected some 27 million subscribers in Canada and Latin America in addition to customers in the United States. This meant that close to all of the company’s 30 million customers worldwide were without on-demand video streaming.

Netflix officials are blaming an outage at an Amazon Web Services’ cloud computing center in Virginia for the system interruption. The outage at Amazon, which began at approximately 3:30 p.m. eastern on Monday, was not completely resolved until around 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday. Most Netflix customers, however, should have had their video streaming available by about 2:00 a.m. Christmas morning.

About Janet Lynn

Janet Lynn - a freelance writer with a great insight into the Entertainment world. jan_grdinich@newstaar.com