On Christmas Eve, an issue with Amazon's cloud services caused a service disruption to customers on the East Coast datacenter. Netflix was one of the primary businesses affected by the disruption and left many users unable to watch movies. This came at a terrible time as many people were watching Christmas movies that evening.

"We want to apologize," Seattle-based Amazon said. "We know how critical our services are to our customers' businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers."

Cloud computing has been billed as a method to outsource data centers cheaply and reduce downtime. As these high-profile outages have demonstrated, moving into the cloud hasn't exactly prevented downtime for many of these services.

The outage apparently stemmed from an accidental deletion of data in a maintenance process. The data deleted from the Elastic Load Balancing service resulted in the downtime. At the peak, 6.8 percent of ELB load balancers were affected.