Updated: Netflix Crippled On Christmas Eve By AWS Outages

‘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.

According to Cockcroft, the problems are due to errors on Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Load Balancing API calls.

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.”

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!