Netflix Goes Down, People Freak Out and Discover Real Life

Facing issues with Netflix? You're not alone. Beginning at 3pm ET, users worldwide started to report connectivity issues with the on-demand movie and TV shows streaming service. Downdetector, a website which monitors outage also confirmed the outage with more than 7,000 user complaints. Netflix confirmed the outage in a tweet a few minutes ago, saying it was "aware of streaming issues and we are working quickly to solve them. We will update you when they are solved." Though the company hasn't offered an explanation for this outage, its servers could be seeing an unusual spike in traffic from people trying to binge watch Luke Cage, which was made available this weekend.

Anyone here uses Netflix and facing the issue too?

Comments

That headline...

[Grim Beefer]

You know...I'm kind of sick of the whole attitude that services we pay for, for entertainment value, are supposed to be held to lower standards of accountability. People are allowed to be displeased if ANY service they pay for faces unscheduled interruption. It doesn't matter if the purpose of that service is a leisure activity, business is business. The snark around "real life" is just a way to downplay the situation due to the presumed lack of importance for the activity itself.

Some people's work schedules, routines, etc. only allow for a bit of entertainment at certain hours of the day, each week, and it could really suck if that thing you paid for in advance isn't working, when you just want to relax after work, or whatever. God help you if you have younger children who often work a certain episode of their favorite TV show into a routine request.

For reasons like these, and countless more, people pay Netflix to deliver content.

Re:That headline...

[ultranova]

How pathetic that people act like this is the end of the world or on par with nuclear war.

So who's acting that way? Or are you simply trying to set up a strawman to distract from Netflix's failure to deliver what its customers pay it for?

I predate the internet, so old farts like me just go, "Eh" and find something else to do.

Thinking other people's problems are insignificant because you don't share them is an equal opportunity character flaw. Don't blame it on your age.

Get a hobby, get a girlfriend, set fire to your neighbor's house, I don't give a shit- just stop whining about your life-giving movie stream isn't working right now.

Those are mighty words for someone spending their weekend whining about other people on Slashdot.

Be prepared.

[DrYak]

God help you if you have younger children who often work a certain episode of their favorite TV show into a routine request.

For such a highly critical use (I'm not joking here) if you only rely 100% on Netflix and don't have any disaster recovery strategy in place, you get what your deserve.

Said as the older sibling. The arrival of DVD - a digital media that can be much more easily and reliably copied as video tapes - was a god send back then.
Most of the parent I know nowadays have media servers at home with local copy of all the "mission critical" movies/tv series.
And local copies downloaded on a tablet.

Streaming is a bad model.

[Gravis Zero]

Outages are a clear example of why streaming services are bad. If Netflix downloaded entire episodes, seasons or series when you watched them, it would be different because you could have a substantial amount of content stored locally. Unfortunately, Netflix will not do this and the very DRM happy entertainment industry will not allow this. With their original content, they could enable local caching but they have chosen to not. Streaming is a bad model.

What does the headline have to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

... with the summary? Not a single word about how "people" are "freaking out" or "discovering real life". This site has turned into a joke in recent years. Do they only hire absolute cretins for compiling these "news"? It makes me furious to know that somebody is getting paid for what I could do a million times better.