Sometimes there's nothing better than taking a day off work, putting on your best pajamas, making a nice meal and then sitting down in front of the TV to watch Netflix until the troubles of the world have passed from your memory. So, if you were one of the many individuals who was attempting to do just that yesterday, and found that the Netflix portion of your day was being unnecessarily uncooperative, you would understand the ire that rose up within people around the world as Netflix experienced a global outage. Now, of course, the company has apologized.
Reports of the issue first started coming in the wee hours of yesterday morning, as users around the world took to social media to share their problems with using Netflix. It wasn't long before the streamer had to post a notice to its website help center to let subscribers know that there was, in fact, an outage and issues with streaming had been found on all devices. As you might imagine, people did not take this well.
OMG. How dare Netflix stop a young lady from watching Vanessa Hudgens fall in love with a time traveling medieval knight at Christmas time! We all know that when it comes to Netflix you want what you want when you want it. Thinking you're about to actually watch the movie or show you've been dying to see and then having Netflix go out or not load the program might be even more devastating than simply not being able to log in at all.
While other Netflix users reported experiencing no outage at all (which is lucky for them), some people did come clean on Twitter as not even noticing that such an important part of modern society was unavailable yesterday. But, for many others, the panic of not having Netflix was very real:
There were several subscribers who reported being stopped from watching Friends and The Office, two shows which we know won't be on Netflix at all for much longer, thanks to the newly revitalized streaming wars, so they missed out on some prime viewing hours while the service was down. Speaking of those streaming wars, there's at least one Netflix subscriber who seems to believe that the outage was a conspiracy:
It's not a bad idea that Disney+, which just debuted on November 12, might have been behind this sudden, unexplained, global outage of Netflix on all devices. And, while I love a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, let's not forget that Disney+ experienced quite a few of its own glitches when it launched, and people were similarly pissed about that. So, I'm going to bet that the tech people keeping that streaming service running probably have their hands full and didn't have too much downtime to mess around with sabotaging a competitor.
It's clear that the Netflix outage brought up all kinds of emotions for people around the world. And, while we can see how important the streamer is to many people, there seems to be some thought that this global issue is just a form of television karma:
OOOOOH! Man, people who love The OA just won't quit, will they? Netflix has, indeed, been through a massive clearing out phase in the past year, with beloved shows like the ones from Marvel, Santa Clarita Diet, One Day At A Time, Grace & Frankie, Lucifer and more getting canned recently. And, some of the shows are not getting an additional season to wrap up cliffhangers, so many fans are beyond annoyed with Netflix.
Well, at least the outage trouble appears to mostly be behind us all now. Time to curl up with those remotes, folks. Be sure to check out what you can catch on Netflix in the coming weeks!
