NEW YORK (Reuters) – An outage at one of Amazon’s web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.’s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.

The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles such as Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray players.

Evers said that the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services’ cloud computing center in Virginia, and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users late on Monday.

“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,” he added.

An outage at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare in April of last year.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides the backbone of Netflix, Slack, Pinterest and thousands of other websites and services, appeared to suffer a widespread outage Tuesday. According to Amazon, the disruption lasted more than 40 minutes..
Slack, Asana, Netflix, Pinterest, and many other apps and websites that rely on AWS were suddenly unresponsive Tuesday evening. Newly-launched Beats 1 radio was also reportedly down more than 40 minutes.
The status dashboard for AWS, which reports service disruptions, was among the sites that were unavailable during the disruption.

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