Netflix users have reported there were problems with accessing the site
yesterday. This is the second time in a week that the site has been
experiencing technical difficulties, after being down for a prolonged
period of time on Christmas Eve.
The online rental site has been around for a long time now. It offers
movie and television shows via Internet streaming as well as DVDs via US
mail, which is based on a monthly subscription. Recent problems with
the site has led customers to express frustration at not getting what
they are paying for during this holiday period.
The drawn-out outage at the end of December was a result of technical
issues with the ELB of Amazon Web Services.
After being resolved, the company provided a statement clarifying that
the problem was not caused by Netflix, but by Amazon Web Services, who
later issued a personal apology to customers. Amazon Web Services
explained to customers that the service disruption had only impacted
applications that were using the ELB service, of which only a fraction
had been affected. But they acknowledged that for those affected, the
outage lasted for "a prolonged period of time". Despite this, Netflix
users were not happy about the site not working for them during the
holiday break.
The Netflix site began to experience problems again, starting from New
Year's Eve. Users have reported that they encountered an error message
on the Netflix website which said that the site was "temporarily
unavailable" and that their technicians were working "to bring the site
back up asquickly as possible". There have also been dozens of user
reports on Twitter as well as reports from third-party monitoring
websites that have shown sporadic outages at the Netflix site. Twitter
users are complaining about this second outage, which again happens to
fall on a holiday. Some users are reporting problems with the Netflix
DVD site, while others are saying that they are having trouble with the
Watch Instantly streaming feature of the site.
However, Netflix has denied there was an outage on the site on Monday or
the day before. They released a statement to say that Netflix streaming
and DVD deliveries were working fine. They said that the problems some
users were experiencing were to do with dvd.netflix.com, the site for
adding DVDs to the queue, and that "streaming was not impacted". The
Netflix DVD site was experiencing some technical difficulties on Monday
and could not be accessed at all times by some members.
In a Twitter update by @netflixhelps, Netflix acknowledged that the site
was having technical difficulties yesterday and that they have since
been resolved. It turns out that the second outage was not as
devastating as the first. The outage on New Years Eve seemed to only
have affected the Netflix DVD site, as opposed to the December outage,
where the entire Netflix service went down for some users for a
prolonged period of time. Throughout this period of outages, Netflix
continued to respond to individual customer problems and enquiries with
the site through @netflixhelps.