Netflix is back after Christmas eve outage

BANGALORE, INDIA: Los Gatos, California-based online video streaming service provider Netflix who suffered an outage on Christmas day eve, thanks to Amazon Web Services, is back in action.

Netflix was down for almost 20 hours during which it apologised to its 20 million customers, many of whom were unable to use its services on certain devices such as PS3, Xbox 360, tablets etc.

According to representatives of Netflix, the outage was caused due to 'outage of some of Amazon's cloud infrastructure'.

For its part Amazon Web Services' Status History page updated at 1:50 PM on Dec 24 said that it has come across some issue with EC2 N.Virginia's Elastic Load Balancing service in its US-East data center.

"Dec 24, 1:50 PM PST We are currently investigating an issue regarding Elastic Load Balancer.

Dec 24, 2:18 PM PST 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.

According to another update on Dec 25, the issue has been resolved.

"Dec 25, 12:02 PM PST The Elastic Load Balancing Service is operating normally. We have confirmed all load balancers are functioning correctly, and API latencies and error rates for ELB related APIs have returned to normal."

This incidence again brings to forth the question as to what needs to be done when such outages strike. We had discussed this issue before as well, however would like to know what our readers have to say about it.