Amazon Cloud Service Blamed for Netflix Outage

Holiday Streaming Problems for Netflix and Amazon

Unfortunately for most Netflix customers some holiday cheer was stripped away during a service interruption. What exactly caused Netlfix streaming services to go down?

On Christmas Eve, Netflix experienced degraded performance and widespread service interruptions which prevented many from watching their favorite Holiday movies.

What exactly caused the outages to occur was hardly explained, as is the case when big companies like Netflix experience technical difficulties. Though rumors trace the problem back to Amazon Cloud services.

Elastic Load Balancers To Blame

Netflix is one of the many companies that rely on Amazon Cloud Services to store, access and stream movies that are stored on dedicated servers. Amazon reportedly traced the problem back to what is called an “Elastic Load Balancer”, a traffic management tool designed to balance the workload across multiple servers. Elastic Load Balancing prevents the streaming service from being overwhelmed with requests to access data, in this case, our favorite holiday movies.

Unfortunately for many of us, such a glitch ruined our holiday fun. While some of us took to some good conversation with friends and family, many took to social media outlets to express their disdain over the outages. How dare they make us rely on good old fashioned conversation to keep ourselves pre-occupied. As more of us rely on streaming services to connect to watch our favorite TV shows, network outages are becoming increasingly unacceptable. It is important however, to realize that even the most redundant networks can experience outages. This is due in large part to the unpredictable weather patterns of winter as well hardware failures which can occur within a data center facility.

Netflix Apologizes

Amazon eventually restored Netflix’s cloud services and many were able to open Christmas Presents while watching their favorite programs. Industry reps were quick to issue an apology (too little too late for most) and have promised a full summary of the events that led the outage to be published later this week.