Netflix Outage: Streaming Site is Down Again, a Week After Major Crash

Culture

Netflix is down. Again.

According to recent reports, Netflix is not working for many users, who are seeing nothing more than an error message every time they attempt to log in. The company has made an official statement, claiming, “We are experiencing some technical difficulty with the Netflix DVD Web site, which as a result may not be available for all members. Our engineers are working to address this issue. Netflix streaming is not impacted.”

I have checked my personal account (at 9:32 a.m. EST) and can confirm that the streaming portion of the website is working just fine for me. However, several people have claimed that their streaming is being impacted as well (although this could simply be a result of them logging in to the DVD section, seeing an error, and assuming that the entire website it down).

Last time an outage happened, users were pointed to the Twitter account @netflixhelps. However, no recent updates been posted on this account, although a message from 18 hours ago does state, “Hi all, currently we are aware of the issue & are working to have it resolved as soon as we can! Thanks!” The account is since then taking individual complaints but there is no general statement or real time updates.

This comes shortly after a widespread Netflix outage around Christmas time. Back then, Netflix had then blamed its Amazon Web Services, and rightly so, perhaps, because Amazon apologized. Netflix had then stated they were going to increase their own line of defenses in order to stay available even when problems such as these occurred, but perhaps they are still planning that out.

Netflix is one of several paid video services available in the United States and accounts for over 20% of peak time internet traffic.