It hasn't been the best year for Amazon Web Services, with the suite of cloud computing products taking down numerous online services in 2012 — and on Christmas Eve here in the US, yet another problem has taken Netflix's streaming services offline. The issue, which first surfaced after 1PM PT today, appears to be centered around the AWS center in Northern Virginia. According to Amazon's status page, the company began investigating problems with its own services at 1:50PT PT. As pointed out by GigaOm, Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft confirmed on Twitter that AWS was the reason for the streaming problem. There's no timeframe yet for when Netflix streaming will resume as normal, though Cockcroft does note that the problem doesn't exist across all devices. We'll keep you updated with any further developments.
We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @netflixhelps for updates.
— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012
Update: Netflix says that the issues should be resolved, and that "we're back to normal streaming levels."
Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We're back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday.
— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012