RSSNetflix glitch takes down site, delays deliveries
By Ed Oswald | Published March 25, 2008, 11:54 AM
The Netflix Web site was down for 12 hours on Monday, and the company says the problem took out both its logistics and delivery systems.s.
Problems began around 7am Pacific time Monday, when customers began seeing a message stating "The Netflix Web site is temporarily unavailable." The outage continued until about 7pm Pacific time.
Netflix is so far staying silent about what caused the problem, although its length caused the company to miss a deadline to mail movies to customers. It reported that some movies still made it out, although the majority will be mailed on Tuesday.
The company has seen its share of outages, including an 18-hour one in July, the longest in its history. However, at that time it was only the Web site that was down, and not the backend which runs its shipping business.
No data was lost during the outage, Netflix says, so customers' queues should be unaffected. The only issue many may notice is a delay in the delivery of discs. The company gave no guidance on how many of its 7.5 million subscribers would be affected.
The outage came at a bad time for the company: it was enjoying a rally on Wall Street where its stock had reached a 52-week high on news of Blockbuster deciding to focus on their retail business.
Blockbuster had been a major competitor to the company, and both spent -- and lost -- significant amounts of money attempting to one-up each other.
Netflix needs to spend more money improving their service and replacing scratched and damaged disks and less on proclaiming how many disks they have shipped. The 5% off one bill is bogus when they should have shipped 5 disks. It's a shame Blockbuster doesn't go after them. I belong to both and their disks and service has been much better.
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|Netflix really does need to improve their service on their website. When I try to use the Instant Play streaming video service the website denies me access saying that I've used too many different computers to access the service. Why should it matter how many computers I use to watch streaming movies?
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|Actually, It would matter a lot... In all fairness, there's no reason for any one user to watch movies from 5 different locations simultaneously, creating unnecessary strains on the servers. Any service provider would only want you to connect to their servers only from one place at a time.... I see it happen all the time and not just with netflix.
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|They seriously need to invest some money into a new CTO and/or process management with as many large scale meltdowns they've had. It's obvious however they're performing systems management now isn't reliable.
Edit: Heh, looks like they don't have a CTO named in their management team.
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|Nothing new, Netflix is crap! when it comes to their website/network I applied for a Network Engineer job which they have listed for about a year now. They really do lack good Network Engineers/Admins
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|I wonder if this has anything to do with the shattered/unplayable discs I kept getting in the mail?
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|maybe you have pissed off your postman
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|This no doubt has something to do with a bug in Blu-Ray Profile 2.0
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