The great Netflix outage of Christmas 2012 is thankfully over, according to a tweet from the company. The service went down last night, during arguably one of the worst possible times ever, when many people stuck at home with their families would hope to seek a little refuge in some streaming movies. 

Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We're back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday.

— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012

Netflix blamed the outage on the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, which frequently takes out parts of the Internet when its servers go down. AWS reported "Elastic Load Balancing Service" issues on its status page last night and this morning. Curiously, this time, the outage only affected Netflix's video service and not Amazon's own video service, as GigaOm's Barb Darrow pointed out. Heroku, a cloud application platform, was also down. Perhaps its not such a good idea for Netflix to use its competition to host its site? As for the rest of you, you can now go back to spending quality, no-talking allowed, movie-time with the fam. 

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