Service has began to come back at Netflix, after a 3 day outage that has cost the company between $1.8M and $3.6M per day in revenue losses.  The problem arose after a glitch in the shipping system that sent all of its 55 distribution centers out of commission.

The shipping problems began Tuesday, and affected about one-third, or 2.8 million of Netflix’s 8.4 million members.  No DVDs at all went out on Tuesday to customers, when they normally ship around 2 million per day as well receive an equal 2 million back from customers, according to ComputerWorld.  The result of which caused many angry subscribers.

Netflix has been posting updates on its community blog all along the way, and to many customer’s delight, got good news this morning; “We’re happy to report that all of our shipping centers are resuming normal operations after experiencing three days of significant issues. Throughout the night and as we post this update, our distribution centers are processing customer orders and getting them into the mail. If a member should have been shipped a disc Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, with rare exception it will ship today (Friday). 

It’s still rather vague what exactly caused the disruption, and Netflix doesn’t even seem to fully understand what happened.  They don’t know if what a hardware or software error, and just called it a “technology error” when defending itself in its blog posts.  They said it began on Tuesday when they couldn’t send out confirmation emails to those that had DVDs shipping that day.  The problem then turned more serious, when the shipping system stopped all together.  Netflix quickly gave credits to all customers involved.

I’ve been a long time fan of Netflix, and with such a new idea, people should have expected that there would be glitches.  Since its inception, there really hasn’t been many long-term hiccups in the service.  Being out for 3 days isn’t the end of world, and since most of their back-end systems are “home grown,” according to the company, you have to expect that it isn’t perfect.

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Entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 7:05 pm under Internet.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
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