Amazon AWS Infrastructure Takes Netflix Services Down Yet Again

As millions of people across the nation just wanted to relax and watch some movies on Netflix this Christmas Eve, they suddenly find the service is down. The reason for the Netflix outage? It appears that Amazon has had a problem with its AWS infrastructure yet again. Yes, we have blogged before about problems with Amazon’s AWS services. We have posted that they promised to fix any problems that would cause their services to go down. It appears, however, that those promises were empty, as Netflix users tried accessing the Netflix service from certain devices, only to find out that it had gone down – and it had gone down due to problems with Amazon’s AWS.

Trying to Access Netflix

The Amazon AWS issue isn’t affecting all Netflix users as of the time of this post, but some devices still can’t connect. Fortunately for those who access the service from their iPhones, iPads and Android devices, the service is now available to them. Others, however, are not so lucky as Netflix tries to get its services back up and running in the Amazon cloud – a problem that Amazon must help fix.

Netflix’s Response

At least Netflix is talking to customers about the issue, unlike Amazon. After all, why would Amazon want to take the fall and let everyone know it was their AWS infrastructure that took the Netflix service down? We applaud Netflix for communicating with customers via social media sites like Twitter, stating, “We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @Netflixhelps for updates.”

The lack of accountability on the part of Amazon has not gone unnoticed. Neither has the fact that Amazon’s AWS is to blame for the issue. As Forbes posted on Twitter, “For the third time this year, problems with Amazon's AWS in Northern Virginia has knocked several websites and services offline, including Netflix.”

The Bottom Line

It’s readily apparent that Amazon has been having some serious issues with its AWS over the past year. Will 2013 be different? Not unless Amazon takes the measures they have promised to take in the past and actually fix the bugs that are creating all this havoc. When your service goes down three times in one year – a service that other businesses count on and millions of consumers are affected by – it’s time to go back to the drawing board and figure out exactly what is going wrong. Let’s face it… Amazon’s AWS issues are not going to fix themselves. The bugs need to be worked out once and for all, as Amazon has promised they would in the past.

Let’s see if Amazon holds true to their promise. Let’s see if 2013 heralds in the era of an error-free Amazon AWS. We at Alertra are pretty sure that users of Amazon’s AWS are all hoping they won’t see a repeat of the issues experienced in 2012.