Companies that rely on cloud computing services provided by Amazon and Heroku received a very unwelcome present on Christmas Eve. Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) infrastructure as a service and its Elastic Beanstalk cloud development service, as well as Heroku’s platform as a service, all experienced downtime, knocking out numerous websites and applications that rely on the services. For consumers, the most noticeable outage was Netflix, which went down just as many were settling in to watch their favorite holiday movies. The outages were reportedly triggered by problems with load balancers in Amazon’s us-east-1 region.
Both Heroku and Amazon came back online on December 25.