Netflix Points Finger at Amazon for Outage, Service Restored

Exposing one of the troubles inherent with cloud computing, Netflix on Christmas Eve coughed up a hairball and left its paying subscribers without streaming video service until the next day. The outage affected subscribers in Canada, Latin America, and the United States.

According to Netflix, the fault belongs to Amazon and its Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia, Reuters reports. An outage at that location began around 12:30 PM PST on Monday and wasn't fully restored until sometime before 8:00 AM PST Tuesday morning, though Netflix says the majority of its subscribers had regained access by 11:00 PM PST on Monday.

Netflix

"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said in a statement. "We are happy that the people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night."

Amazon had no comment on the outage.