Netflix Streaming Down On Christmas: Company Blames Amazon Cloud Outage

Netflix's video streaming service was hit by an outage on Christmas Eve, a prime movie-watching night, because of a breakdown at Amazon cloud servers.

The company (Nasdaq:NFLX) based in Los Gatos, Calif., apologized in a company tweet for the outage Monday night.

“We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @Netflixhelps for updates.”

Netflix said later Tuesday that service had been restored.

The problems started Monday afternoon at Amazon’s data centers in northern Virginia, Wired reported, and soon customers were reporting downtime with Netflix’s streaming video service.

At 9:30 p.m. PST, a Netflix spokesman said the issue affects “some, but not all devices that can stream from Netflix. Our teams are working hard with Amazon Web Services to address the issue and hope to have streaming available for everyone again soon.”

An Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) spokeswoman confirmed Monday night that the company was still working to resolve the problems.

On the Amazon Web Services Service Health Dashboard, the company said it was experiencing problems with its cloud-based search, load balancing, and software management services. Some customers are “experiencing significant levels of traffic loss,” Amazon said.

Heroku, another cloud-based service for software developers, said it was having problems too, according to Wired, thanks to the Amazon outage.

Amazon Web Service operates server systems that deliver Internet service for many companies. It has been hit by several outages this year, knocking out websites such as Pinterest, Instagram and Foursquare.

Netflix's cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, said not all customer devices were affected by the outage, The Wall Street Journal reported.

"Some devices working, others not," he said on his Twitter account. "Still waiting for AWS to fix it."