Amazon (NASDAQ:
AMZN
) had a lot to say about the service outage that occurred on
Christmas Eve, which took down its chief competitor in streaming
video -- Netflix (NASDAQ:
NFLX
). In a
lengthy statement
with more than 1,100 words, Amazon attempts to explain what
happened last week.
"The service disruption began at 12:24 PM PST on December 24th
when a portion of the ELB state data was logically deleted," the
Amazon Web Services team wrote. "This data is used and maintained
by the ELB control plane to manage the configuration of the ELB
load balancers in the region (for example tracking all the backend
hosts to which traffic should be routed by each load balancer).
"The data was deleted by a maintenance process that was
inadvertently run against the production ELB state data. This
process was run by one of a very small number of developers who
have access to this production environment. Unfortunately, the
developer did not realize the mistake at the time. After this data
was deleted, the ELB control plane began experiencing high latency
and error rates for API calls to manage ELB load balancers."
This is an interesting read for anyone who is interested in
learning more about the inner workings of Amazon's cloud services.
It is also a notable read for anyone who was expecting Amazon to
openly apologize to one of its most important clients --
Netflix.
With more than 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide,
Netflix is a massive firm. It is also the chief competitor to the
on-demand video component of Amazon Prime. Amazon has tried to use
its streaming video service to convince shoppers to sign up for the
service, knowing that those who do will be more likely to shop at
Amazon.com. If consumers subscribe to Netflix instead, however,
they may be less interested in the content that Amazon has to
offer.
One could argue that Amazon was wise to avoid mentioning Netflix
or any other client by name. However, in going out of its way to
explain how the outage happened, it seems odd that Netflix did not
even acknowledge the company that suffered the most.
"Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize," Amazon
wrote at the end of its statement. "We know how critical our
services are to our customers' businesses, and we know this
disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers.
We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to
drive further improvement in the ELB service."
Follow me
@LouisBedigianBZ
(c) 2013 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice.
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