December 25, 2012 - 09:13 AMT
Amazon AWS outage knocks Netflix offline

For the third time this year, problems with Amazon’s AWS in Northern Virginia have knocked several websites and services offline, including Netflix, Forbes reported.

According to AWS’ Service Health Dashboard, problems began at 1:50 PM PST, and as of 5:49 PM, the company was continuing “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.”

Netflix has confirmed they are being affected by these issues, acknowledging this outage “couldn’t happen at a worse time as families and friends are gathered together – and likely getting bored.” Via Twitter, Netflix said: “We’re sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @Netflixhelps for updates.” Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockroft also said that this is only affecting only certain devices, though many users have reported gaming consoles and connected TVs have gone offline.

As of 6:45 PST, Netflix was still down, and AWS has not resolved the problems in the US-EAST-1 Region.

As of 8:46 PM PST, AWS and Netflix were still experiencing issues. According to the AWS Service Health Dashboard, “We continue to work on resolving issues with the Elastic Load Balancing Service in the US-EAST-1 region. The issues are affecting both existing and newly created ELBs.” Netflix reports, via Twitter, “we’re working on it.”