(CNN) -- Aah, Christmas Eve. A time for family and friends, eggnog and mistletoe, carols and cookies ... and catching up on "Downton Abbey"? Apparently, that's what legions of us had in mind when -- humbug! -- the Netflix Instant streaming service went down. The outage, caused when some Amazon servers used by Netflix crashed, lasted more than 20 hours. Like many companies, Netflix pays to rent space on Amazon's massive banks of servers. The outage, which affected devices such as tablets and smartphones, began at about 3:30 p.m. ET Monday. Many Netflix users had to scratch those plans to gather around the laptop for "It's a Wonderful Life," "A Christmas Story" or "Santa's Slay" (the 2005 classic starring former wrestler Bill Goldberg as a deranged Santa demon). Although for the desperate, "Shrek the Halls" was available on ABC.
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Netflix Instant outage hit users on Christmas Eve
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The outage, due to Amazon servers going down, lasted about 20 hours
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Users took to Twitter to voice despair, express humor
Here are some of our favorite @placeholder posts from the long winter night of our discontent: