A Christmas Eve outage at Netflix Inc.s’ digital TV and movie streaming service disrupted holiday plans for thousands of families Monday night, and showed how deeply ingrained online viewing has become in just a few years.
“Christmas Eve tradition ruined,” viewer Tom Moccia complained on Twitter.
“Maybe I should just get cable,” groused Benjamin Kerensa on the messaging service.
Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, sent out a message on its Twitter feed apologizing for the outage at about 4 p.m. Monday.
“We’re sorry for the Christmas Eve outage,” the company said. “Terrible timing!”
The company's video streaming service was not back up until Christmas morning.
“We’re back to our normal streaming levels,” the company tweeted at about 9:30 a.m.
The outage—the result of an outage at Amazon Web Services' Virginia cloud computing center—was felt by customers from Canada to the U.S. and Latin America, spokesman Joris Evers told Reuters.
"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers said. "We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix-capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night."