Cloud Computing: Christmas Eve AWS outage stings Netflix but not Amazon Prime

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Updated: Oh to be a fly on the wall for the conversations that must be going on between Netflix and Amazon engineers this holiday season.

If you’re not a Netflix subscriber, you may not yet know that issues at Amazon’s US-East data center facility took down Netflix’ streaming service on Christmas Eve — arguably the worst possible time. Starting at 1:50 p.m. PST, as GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers reported, Amazon’s US east facility reported issues with its Elastic Load Balancing service that carried over into Christmas morning.  Interestingly, Amazon Prime Instant Video streaming service, which competes head-on with Netflix and which also runs on AWS, appeared to be unaffected by the US East snafus…

Update 9:55 a.m. PST: One commenter from Mass. reported his Amazon Prime Instant Video was down for two days. I was able to access that service this morning with no problem. Stay tuned for updates on this.

The latest update to the AWS status page reads:

Dec 25, 4:36 AM PST We continue to work on resolving issues with the Elastic Load Balancing Service in the US-EAST-1 region. These issues are affecting updates to both existing and newly created ELBs. A subset of ELBs that made configuration changes or changes to registered instances during the event are experiencing errors or receiving reduced traffic. We continue to work toward a full recovery of the service. We apologize for the continued impact.

Other sites, including Heroku’s Platform as a Service, were also affected. Heroku, like Netflix, have been down this path before with previous AWS US East glitches…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/christmas-eve-aws-outage-stings-netflix-but-not-amazon-prime/