Amazon outage whacked Netflix US customers on Christmas Eve
Clouds descend
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Netflix is pointing the finger at Amazon’s cloud for the terribly-timed outage that left millions of US customers unable to access the service on Christmas Eve.
Amazon’s ‘Elastic Load Balancing’ snapped, affecting a number of Amazon Web Services customers in the USA – with Netflix among them and, by extension, more than 20 million Netflix customers.
Amazon’s status announcement stated: “We are investigating increased error rates for Elastic Load Balancing API calls in the US-EAST-1 region. This issue does not affect traffic on running load balancers, but the API may report that instances are out of service for some calls”.
Apparently, Amazon doesn’t use Elastic Load Balancing for its Amazon Prime movie streaming, since no outages were reported by Prime customers.
Netflix’s nightmare before Christmas began at 3.30pm, according to the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ says other AWS customers hit by the outage included software company Heroku and the social media app Scope.
On its Facebook page, Netflix stated: “We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage and we're aware that many of you are having trouble streaming. Our teams are working hard along with Amazon Web Services to address the issue, and we hope to be back up as quickly as possible.” ®
COMMENTS
Outsourcing
This is a good example of where outsourcing is not a good idea. Netflix is relying on a company that competes with them to facilitate their service. There was nothing Netflix could do to resolve the problem.
I've had "business" partners that tried to get me to outsource certain pieces of production when I had a manufacturing company. I never saw the point since we were able to keep our employees busy all of the time and didn't have to rely on another company to meet our goals.
Outsourcing has been a fashionable thing for business executives, but doesn't make much sense in the real world. There is always a certain amount of outside services a company will use such as machining, plating and shipping, but there are many suppliers and switching from one to the next is quick and painless. Having a single source for something critical to your company is always a risk. If that single source is also a competitor, it's time to reconsider if your business is worthwhile.
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