Netflix suffers another outage, but this one isn't as bad -- yet

Netflix might want 2012 to just end already considering that the online rental giant reportedly faced another bout of downtime on Monday morning.

However, this time the outage supposedly only plagued the DVD website, which might come as a huge relief to anyone planning to curl up on the couch and stream a movie this evening on New Year's Eve.

To recall, the downtime was much worse just one week ago as the entire service went down for some users on Christmas Eve.

On that occasion, Netflix attributed the blame to Amazon Web Services, which later issued an apology to its customers.

AWS explained that the problem stemmed from its Elastic Load Balancing Service (ELB) in AWS's US-East Region datacenters, asserting that "while the service disruption only affected applications using the ELB service (and only a fraction of the ELB load balancers were affected), the impacted load balancers saw significant impact for a prolonged period of time."

Yet as for today's occurrence, it's not clear what role AWS plays in this outage -- if any at all.

Despite some tweets popping up from Netflix users having trouble with Watch Instantly streaming, Netflix reps told TechCrunch that "engineers are working to address this issue," while "streaming is not impacted.”

UPDATE: Netflix PR sent us the following statement:

Netflix streaming is working normally. DVD shipments are working normally. The dvd.netflix.com Web site, for adding DVDs to a member's queue, is experiencing some technical issues and is not accessible at all times to all members. Our engineers are working to address this issue.