Netflix blames Christmas Eve outage that affected 27 million users on Amazon

Netflix on Wednesday was blaming Amazon for an embarrassing outage that left millions of people unable to snuggle up with the online film streaming service on Christmas Eve.

More than 27 million Netflix members in the Americas may have been unable to access shows or films online due to a problem at Amazon Web Services, which rents out computing power in datacenters in the Internet "cloud."

The Netflix outage began mid-day in California on Monday and lasted late into the night, according to the company. No problems were reported with viewing offerings at Amazon's rival online film service.

"We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices on Christmas morning could watch TV shows or movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused Christmas Eve," the company said in a statement.

"We are investigating the cause and will do what we can to prevent reoccurrence."

In a message fired off at Twitter, Netflix referred to the outage as "terrible timing." Netflix noted that users in Europe were not affected.

Amazon told AFP that the Netflix outage was due to "issues with the Elastic Load Balancing service" that affected some AWS customers in the United States.

AWS began recovering late on Christmas Eve and was back in proper working order on Christmas day, according to the Seattle, Washington-based online retail and services titan.

"Our Netflix subscription is back," Twitter user Rebekah Rosser said on Christmas Day. "That was a close call; I almost had to get a life."