Stefan Mileschin

The problems of dependence on cloud based systems were highlighted in the US over Christmas when the video distributor Netflix lost a fortune due to an outage at Amazon.

The company hoped to make a killing over Christmas as punters decided that since the US had cancelled all the good TV series during the Christmas break they would rent a video instead.

But an outage at one of Amazon's web service centres hit users of Netflix streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day.

Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States were knocked out and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home.

This meant that even gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players which used Netflix would not work.

It has been estimated that more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the outage and could have potentially been affected.

According to Reuters, the event marks the latest in a series of outages from Amazon Web Services.

Officials at Amazon Web Services have not said anything about the outage. However it does show that it is risky putting all your eggs in one cloud basket.

http://news.techeye.net/internet/ama...lixs-christmas