The Netflix Web Site Is Temporarily Unavailable Again
The online hub of Netflix’s rental system went down Monday evening and remained unavailable until Tuesday afternoon, locking out subscribers for more than 18 hours. Spokesman Steve Swasey attributed the outage to an unanticipated problem that he declined to describe.”
–“Netflix reeling from customer losses, site outage,” Associated Press, July 24, 2007
Netflix’s infamous 2007 outage appears to be back in theatrical release. The DVD rental pioneer’s Web site went down at 6:58 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time today and has yet to return. “This is an unanticipated outage,” said a Netflix (NFLX) spokesman. “Our engineers are working feverishly on it.”
But perhaps not feverishly enough. As of 6:04 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time the site remains down and is jeopardizing DVD deliveries nationwide.
As service outages go, it couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Shares of the company rose to a new multiyear high last week after Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Derek Brown said Blockbuster’s (BBI) renewed focus on its traditional retail operations “has opened a significant window of opportunity for Netflix that the company seems to be capitalizing on very, very successfully.”
