Netflix Goes Down: Company Says Only DVD Website Affected

Following its lengthy Christmas Eve outage, Netflix is again experiencing issues today, according to a message posted on the Netflix website, dozens of reports from users on Twitter, and other third-party website monitoring services.

Netflix’s official accounts have not yet been updated with any details about today’s issues, which have been underway all morning long. (See updates below).

On the Netflix website, users are reporting seeing a message that reads:

We’re Sorry

The Netflix site is temporarily unavailable. Our engineers are working hard to bring the site back up as quickly as possible.

The website monitoring service Sitedown.co first spotted this error message around 10:33 AM, while DownRightNow is reporting a steep drop off in website uptime as far back as three hours ago. In addition, a number of irritated Twitter users have been complaining about the outage. Unfortunately for Netflix, the downtime again falls on a day when many of Netflix’s customers are off from work and relaxing at home, or perhaps traveling back home after time spent visiting family over the holidays.

Netflix recently recovered from a long Christmas Eve outage, which the company later blamed on issues with its Amazon host, and specifically with Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Load Balancing API calls. At the time, users were pointed to @netflixhelps for an update. That account, however, has not posted anything about the current outage, as its last update was 19 hours ago. (Update: it has now posted, but the message was not about the outage; Update 2: it is now responding to individual complaints, but no general statement).

Because some users are reporting trouble with the DVD side of the website and others with streaming, it’s unclear at this time which aspects of Netflix’s site and service have been affected or how widespread those problems are. For what it’s worth, streaming is working for me but the DVD side of the site is down. My guess is that some users are seeing the error message upon login to Netflix.com, and are assuming that the whole service (including streaming) is affected. However, without official confirmation, that’s only a guess.

We’ve reached out to Netflix’s PR for more information, and will update if the company responds.

Update: Here is Netflix’s official response. The company says the DVD side is sporadically unavailable to some members. Streaming is unaffected:

“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.”