Amazon apologizes for Christmas Eve Netflix disruption
Amazon is apologizing for a prolonged disruption last week that affected Netflix and other companies that use the e-commerce giant’s cloud-computing services.
“We want to apologize,” Amazon said in a statement posted on its website. “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 its lengthy apology and summary of events, Seattle-based Amazon said that the service disruption began on Dec. 24 at an East Coast data center and affected its Elastic Load Balancing Service. Although only a fraction of customers were affected, those who were “saw significant impact for a prolonged period of time.”
Many Netflix users, for instance, were unable to access their online content during the disruption, irking customers who wanted to watch movies and TV shows on Christmas Eve.
Amazon provides cloud-computing services, including storage and computing power, to many well-known websites including Yelp and Pinterest.
Although Netflix quickly restored its service after the Christmas Eve glitch, the video subscription service ran into new problems Monday. According to Bloomberg, Netflix said that some customers were unable to access the DVD portion of its website because of a technical problem.
The company’s streaming operation hasn’t been affected, Bloomberg said, citing Joris Evers, a spokesman for Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix. The company is working to fix the problem, he said.
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