At the end of last year, Netflix suffered a prolonged outage because Amazon’s cloud services, which Netflix uses to host most of its infrastructure, went down. At the time, Amazon’s own video services continued to function without any issues. Last night, it was Amazon’s turn to suffer from a multi-hour outage. According to a number of tips we received, as well as a number of reports on Twitter and other social networks, Amazon’s Instant Video service and Prime Instant Video went down sometime in the late afternoon yesterday and remained offline for a large part of the evening.
So far, Amazon hasn’t publicly acknowledged last night’s outage and its @amazonvideo account has remained silent since the first reports came in. Amazon Web Services, which powers Amazon’s Video Services, continued to work without issues last night.
One of our readers provided us with a boilerplate email he received from Amazon last night after he complained about the outage:
Hello,
We’re sorry for the trouble you had while trying to connect to Amazon Instant Video. If you try again, you should be able to connect without encountering further problems.
We look forward to seeing you again soon.
We have contacted Amazon for more details about this outage and will update this post once we hear back from them.
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Hey @AmazonVideo maybe mention VOD is down right now. It's nice when the marketing tweets come with useful info between them.
— Ry4an Brase (@Ry4an) March 30, 2013
https://twitter.com/Aaron_RS/status/317805525507125248
@amazonvideo #fail. A little notice of when you're going to do maintenance would be nice. I expect a credit, or will cancel Amazon Prime.
— djdeedle (@djdeedle) March 30, 2013
