Amazon apologizes for service outage on Christmas Eve

Amazon apologizes for service outage on Christmas Eve In a Monday post, Amazon Web Services (AWS) extended an apology for its Christmas Eve service outage which caused disruptions to client Netflix's video service for several users in the US, Canada and Latin America.

According to the AWS post, the service outage - which started at around 12.30pm PT on December 24 - was caused by human error. The post further elaborated that the outage was a result of an accidental deletion of some data from Amazon's Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) service, which facilitates the automatic distribution of network traffic to Netflix and other services that support streaming.

With the ELB control plane using and managing the data for administering the configuration of the ELB load balancers in the outage-affected region, the AWS post said that the developer, who inadvertently deleted the ELB data did not "realize the mistake at the time."

Further explaining that it took Amazon several hours to figure out that ELB data had been deleted, the AWS post said that when the problem was finally figured out, the initial recovery effort failed, because of which the Netflix outage got prolonged. Eventually, the service was revived for all affected users at around 10:30 a. m. Pacific on Christmas Day.

Acknowledging that the "disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers," the AWS post said: "We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement in the ELB service."