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

I Am With TimeWarnerCable

[Anonymous Coward]

and this never happens. I get perfect video and audio, no compression artifacts, and low, low prices. I am in heaven. Don't you want to be in heaven? Join us. Be one of the beautiful people.

Couldn't reach Google, either.

[dgatwood]

I was in the middle of debugging a problem caused by Comcast switching from non-static IPv6 addresses to static IPv6 addresses (causing me to get a new set of IPv6 addresses and breaking my in-home DNS because my Airport Extreme was looking for my DNS servers at the old address), so I noticed the Netflix outage, but I also noticed that I was unable to reach Google.com at the same time. I didn't bother to use traceroute to track down the problem because it went away by the time I finished disabling the AAAA records for all my domains....

Then I read this story, and sure enough, Google showed a huge spike in outage reports at exactly the same time as Netflix. Unless Netflix uses the Google cloud for hosting (AFAIK, they use AWS, not Google), I'd imagine that this outage involved some sort of Akamai DNS problem or network routing problem or something else not specific to Netflix.

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.

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.