So it"s Christmas Eve in the US and all through many houses, there are lots of annoyed people who were planning on streaming their favorite Christmas movies through Netflix (National Lampoon"s Christmas Vacation, anyone?). As it turns out, the service is experiencing an extended outage that"s affecting many US users.
Netflix"s Twitter account has admitted it is working on the problem but there"s no word yet on what caused the outage.
We"re sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @netflixhelps for updates.
— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012
Hopefully things will be back up by the time Santa is finished with his rounds.
Update: Engadget reports that the outage is only affecting certain devices. Our smartphone and smart TV products appear to be affected by the issues. Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft stated on his own Twitter account that the problems, which began around 4 pm Eastern time, are due to glitches with the servers over at Amazon Web Services.
Update 2: Netflix"s Twitter account now says that all their services are back up and running, about 16 hours or so after the outage started:
Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We"re back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday.
— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012
Source: Netflix on Twitter