Movie buffs across America were dismayed and lost no time in complaining on Christmas Eve when Netflix, the world’s largest on-demand video service, crashed and left at-home silver screens in the dark. The company suffered outages between 3:30 EST and late Christmas Eve, blaming the outage on Amazon’s web storage system.
Across social media, Netflix users voiced their unhappiness, with some saying the outage had ruined their Christmas Eve plans.
By the time streaming service was restored, one Twitter post tied the Christmas restoration to the Charles Dickens’ classic yuletide tale:
Twitter tweet: "What's to-day, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge. "To-day?" replied the boy. "Why, Christmas Day." "And is Netflix working again?" "Why, tis!"
One user tied the outage to something a little more sinister:
Twitter tweet: Netflix says that them shutting down for hours was not their fault and the solution is to arm every citizen with a gun.
Another was reminded of the baby boomers:
Twitter tweet: Thanks to outage we can likely expect a moderate population explosion in nine months.
Netflix apologized for the blackouts:
Twitter tweet: We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned.
A particular tweet turned the outage into something tragic:
Twitter tweet: "We're unable to connect you to Netflix. Please try again later." Why don't you just rip my heart out and feed it to a pack of wolves. Others were relying on the video streams to keep their families entertained:
Twitter-tweet: Still waiting for headline: "With Netflix servers down, children turn to parents, relatives for 'conversation'"
Twitter tweet: There is one night each year when it is guaranteed I will gather the family to watch a movie . . . Christmas Eve.
Twitter tweet: Thoughts and prayers to all the families with Netflix outages across the country.
But a look at the hashtag #christmasruined showed many who were using the label were speaking against Netflix.
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