Amazon apologises for Christmas Eve outage

Grazed from The Age.  Author: Danielle Kucera.

Amazon.com has apologised for a December 24 disruption in its cloud-computing services that hindered Netflix customers from watching movies, and said it is taking steps to prevent a recurrence.  Netflix said last week that many users in the Americas were unable to access online content on Christmas Eve because of an outage caused by Amazon’s web storage and computing system. Amazon didn’t identify Netflix in its statement, which was posted online on December 29, according to Tera Randall, a spokeswoman for Amazon Web Services.

"We want to apologise," Seattle-based Amazon said. "We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers."…

Amazon, the largest online retailer, has billed its 6-year- old cloud-computing offering as a cheap and safe way for customers to outsource their data centres. It’s a business that may bring in about $US1.5 billion ($1.4 billion) in revenue for Amazon in 2012, according to Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. in San Francisco. Occasional outages can undermine confidence in the service, which makes it possible for companies like Netflix to run their operations via the internet…

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