Amazon Web Services (AWS) couldn't have picked a worse time to have a service outage for its Netflix customers. Just as thousands of Netflix users were settling in on Christmas Eve to watch a movie at home, AWS went down.
"We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @Netflixhelps for updates," Netflix tweeted at 4:25 PST, Dec. 25.
[Related: The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2012 ]
Services were not restored until Christmas day morning, leading one customer to tweet, "Thanks to @netflix outage we can likely expect a moderate population explosion in nine months."
On Wednesday, the AWS service dashboard showed interrupted services for Dec. 24 in its Northern Virginia hosting centers.
Other sites affected by the outages included Heroku.
Amazon has suffered two other significant outages this year. On June 14, a service disruption in Amazon's Virginia data centers stopped operations for about six hours, affecting scores of customers.
On Oct. 22, Amazon Web Services went down in its Northern Virginia market, causing website outages in an unknown number of companies.
Jillian E. Mirandi, an analyst with Technology Business Research, criticized Amazon in October for allowing repeated outages.
"Major vendors who run their entire businesses on AWS, such as Netflix, Foursquare, Pinterest and Salesforce.com’s Heroku platform were affected in the October 2012 outage," Jillian E. Mirandi, an analyst with Technology Business Research, wrote in report following Amazon's quarterly earnings report Thursday. "If major companies such as these continue to experience outages, they will be tempted to move services onto competing IaaS products.
