Who really runs Netflix?

Amazon isn’t just the world’s biggest online retailer, one of its fastest-growing businesses lately is managing web storage for major online firms like Netflix. A lot of Netflix customers found that out the hard way on Christmas Eve, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) crashed, blacking out Netflix service for millions of Canadians and Americans at a peak time. Only a few weeks earlier, Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings said he hoped to have Netflix entirely hosted on Amazon by the end of next year. Despite the glitch, he has made no move to end the relationship, and Amazon’s revenue from AWS—which, according to analysts, could soon be as much as $3 billion a year—seems safe. But people did notice that Amazon’s own rival service, Amazon Prime, was unaffected by the outage. Maybe it’s not a great idea to allow your biggest competitor to have so much power over your business.