The note that greeted visitors to Netflix.com tonight.
(Credit:
Screen shot by Steven Musil/CNET)
Netflix suffered an outage for at least two hours tonight that left millions of subscribers without access to their queue or the ability to stream movies.
In the early evening, visitors to Netflix were greeted by a posting that notified them the site was temporarily unavailable. Netflix spokesman Steven Swasey told CNET the company’s technicians were busy trying to get the site operating again, but he did not know the nature of the problem.
Those trying to access Netflix from an
iPad app received an error message that read, “The requested URL /WiHome was not found on this server.”
Online retail is more than a decade old, but site outages are still a nuisance. The stakes, however, have gone up for Netflix. The company is now an entertainment cornerstone in millions of homes. Last year, Netflix grew more than 60 percent and now has more than 20 million subscribers.
During the outage, scores of subscribers turned to Twitter to complain, ask questions, or make fun of all the ruckus.
“Netflix is down? Save us all,” read one Twitter post.
One of the side shows was watching to see if all the Twitter action would be enough to get the problem into the social network’s Trending Topics, the spot the service reserves for the topics attracting the most attention. It hadn’t made it as of 5:40 p.m. PT.
Don’t look for Netflix to provide details about what caused the outage. Typically, managers there are pretty tight-lipped about glitches.
