This week if you lived on the East Coast of the United States and other parts of the world you may have seen many popular services go down. All at once on Tuesday Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video all stopped working for many subscribers.
The truth is Amazon was behind one of the largest and longest outages of streaming services from Netflix to PlayStation Vue.
All of these services used Amazon’s Web Services, also known as AWS. This is a hosting service that many companies take advantage of for inexpensive and historically reliable hosting. Even sites such as Engadget were affected and taken offline for some time.
It is amazing to see how Amazon is running even its main competitors in the streaming world such as Netflix. So next time you are watching Netflix, Hulu, or PlayStation Vue remember part of that sever is being hosted on Amazon’s backend.
So what caused this outage? We are not 100% sure. We are waiting for Amazon to confirm what happened. The outage was limited to its East Coast US servers. This meant someone in New York may have been affected but users on the West Coast probably didn’t notice anything different.
Hopefully Amazon gets the service fixed quickly, but for now it was an interesting learning moment for how intertwined all these services are.
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