Netflix Makes Amends For Outage

If you get your DVDs through Netflix you may have noticed a small problem this week. The web service experienced an outage Monday for eleven hours. That’s eleven hours customers weren’t able to rate movies and obsess over their queue. That’s also eleven hours that movies weren’t leaving the Netflix warehouses like you’ve seen in their commercials.

To make amends, the company is giving a 5% credit toward the bills of customers whose shipments were delayed by the outage. Thankfully, the company had the problems fixed by Tuesday, which is a higher volume day than Mondays.

Tooting the company’s own horn, spokesman Steve Swasey pointed out to The Associated Press, This was completely proactive on Netflix's part. There's no requirement for Netflix to do this, no obligation. There was no request for it. We thought it was the right thing to do.” That’s great that it was the right thing to do, but you lose points for pointing that out so blatantly.

Netflix did not offer information on how many customers were affected by the outage, but I can’t help but notice their reparations are only going towards customers who had actual DVD shipping affected by the outage. What about the obsessive compulsive customers who log on to rate every movie they’ve seen and continually tweak their queue? Didn’t the outage cause them distress, or is helping them out not the right thing to do? You’d think the company would offer some sort of amends for that as well, especially taking into account that the ratings system stayed down longer than the order processing part.

This outage aside, Netflix has proven to be stable, with this being the second-longest outage since the company started nine years ago.