‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even those in the lighthearted holiday fare you were planning to watch on Netflix, which has been down since 1pm PST for some customers. Netflix confirmed the outage with a tweet on its official channel, though Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft said on Twitter that the service is still working on some devices.
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
According to Cockcroft, the problems are due to errors on Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Load Balancing API calls.
Bunch of ELBs down, lots of happy Netflix instances getting no traffic, still waiting for AWS to fix it. Some devices working, others not.
— adrian cockcroft (@adrianco) December 25, 2012
For more information on exactly what an ELB is, check out Amazon’s explanation. For status updates from AWS, visit its service health dashboard. Problems are originating in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region. The latest ELB update at 5:49pm PST reads “we continue to work on resolving issues with the Elastic Load Balancing Service in the US-EAST-1 region. Traffic for some ELBs are currently experiencing significant levels of traffic loss.”
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This is the latest in a series of high profile Web outages related to Amazon Web Services. In October, issues at AWS affected Reddit, Pinterest, Airbnb, Foursquare, Minecraft and other popular Web sites, while back in May, outages at AWS data centers took down Pinterest, Instagram and Netflix.
UPDATED:
Netflix says service is back to normal. So some of you in the U.S. still have time to savor “Fireplace For Your Home” on Christmas, rated four out of five stars and featuring “famous old-fashioned, wood-burning fireplace, as well as a natural crackling yule log fireplace all set to Christmas holiday favorites.” Yay!
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
