Yes, I caught the news that Netflix was down for 11 hours yesterday (thanks for the tips!) and experienced it first hand. However, I had limited blogging time available and chose to cover the more significant Sirius/XM merger update.
Site outages aren’t so unusual, though this Netflix one is notable for its length… AND apparently a related outage on their back-end, delaying most Monday shipments until today. I’ve been a customer on and off since the early days (1999!) and whatever catastrophic failure they experienced yesterday doesn’t change my appreciation for their service. However, it’s obvious they’re in need of more redundancy – or an improved implementation of their current strategy, which obviously failed.
In my former IT life, one role I had was assisting in the design and implementation of a continuity of operations plan (COOP) for an enterprise-wide messaging system. And fortunately, we never had to test our assumptions and solutions under real world conditions. It’s pretty challenging (though stimulating) trying to account for numerous potential scenarios (including the destruction of a facility and/or death of the employees) and engineer around them… So, I’m willing to cut Netflix some slack as long as downtime remains an infrequent occurrence.
It didn’t affect my Netflix service, I still haven’t watched these 3 movies I have…