Netflix outage briefly stifles holiday movie streaming in North America

Netflix down December 26
All of the shows you couldn't watch

Netflix has become a steady source of entertainment for families during the holidays, but the video on demand service went dark in North America tonight.

The Netflix outage affected customers in the US, Canada and Latin America, according to the official Netflix customer support Twitter account.

"To our customers in the US, CA, and Latin America: we're aware of streaming issues on all devices & working to resolve the problem ASAP," tweeted NetflixCS.

This means Netflix went down on every device from the inexpensive Chromecast to not-so-cheap Xbox One.

Update: It's back, but history repeats itself

The same Netflix Twitter account updated everyone about an hour later, tweeting, "The issues reported earlier have been fixed. Our apologies - and thank you for your patience."

This isn't the first Christmas-timed outage for the popular video streaming service. It also experienced an ill-timed error Christmas Eve last year due to an Amazon Web Services glitch.

And just like last year, tonight's Netflix outage sent users on Christmas vacation into a brief panic.

"Please hurry, I was in the middle of an awesome episode of mad men!" tweeted Melina from California to Netflix customer support.

Others had fun with the situation, like Chris Higgins of Oregon, who asked, "Got an ETA? We're about to switch to "reading books" over here. The situation is dire."

Even Twitter employee Ginger Riker got in on the holiday-timed outage joking, tweeting: "'Twas the night after Christmas, and all through the house, not a movie was streaming and now I'm suuuuuper bored."

Matt Swider