Amazon outage disrupts Netflix service

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LOS GATOS, Calif., Dec. 25 (UPI) -- Netflix said it was "working hard with Amazon Web Services" to restore movie streaming that was disrupted Christmas Eve by an outage in Amazon's U.S. system.

The outage at Amazon's Virginia data centers started to affect Netflix customers at 12:30 p.m. PST, and a Netflix spokesman said 9 hours later technicians were still working on the problem, Wired reported Tuesday.

"Our teams are working hard with Amazon Web Services to address the issue and hope to have streaming available for everyone again soon," the spokesman said in a text message.

Cloud computing services such as Amazon's are supposed to make streaming more reliable, Wired said.

However, this is the third time this year an Amazon outage has affected Netflix, the report said.

Amazon Web Services said on its Health Dashboard it was having trouble with several of its cloud-based services.

"It's been hours & it's Christmas Eve," a Netflix customer said in a tweet. "It's classic movie night!!!"

Wired said the outage also disrupted Heroku, a cloud-based service for software developers.

Business Insider reported Amazon Prime -- Amazon's movie streaming service -- was not affected by the outage. The Wall Street Journal reported previous Amazon outages had affected Pinterest, Instagram and Foursquare service.