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Movies Television

Netflix Goes Down, People Freak Out and Discover Real Life 88

Facing issues with Netflix? You're not alone. Beginning at 3pm ET, users worldwide started to report connectivity issues with the on-demand movie and TV shows streaming service. Downdetector, a website which monitors outage also confirmed the outage with more than 7,000 user complaints. Netflix confirmed the outage in a tweet a few minutes ago, saying it was "aware of streaming issues and we are working quickly to solve them. We will update you when they are solved." Though the company hasn't offered an explanation for this outage, its servers could be seeing an unusual spike in traffic from people trying to binge watch Luke Cage, which was made available this weekend.

Anyone here uses Netflix and facing the issue too?
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Netflix Goes Down, People Freak Out and Discover Real Life

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  • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Saturday October 01, 2016 @05:12PM (#52995445) Journal

    At about 3pm Eastern Time, I started watching episode 3 of Luke Cage. Finished that and then watched an episode from the new season of Longmire.

    Didn't see any problem at all.

    • I noticed it wasn't working. But I was tired so just went to youtube for awhile and turned my brain off. By the time it woke up netflix was back.

      • But I was tired so just went to youtube for awhile and turned my brain off.

        YouTube has that effect on me too.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01, 2016 @05:13PM (#52995453)

    and this never happens. I get perfect video and audio, no compression artifacts, and low, low prices. I am in heaven. Don't you want to be in heaven? Join us. Be one of the beautiful people.

  • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Saturday October 01, 2016 @05:13PM (#52995455) Homepage Journal

    I was in the middle of debugging a problem caused by Comcast switching from non-static IPv6 addresses to static IPv6 addresses (causing me to get a new set of IPv6 addresses and breaking my in-home DNS because my Airport Extreme was looking for my DNS servers at the old address), so I noticed the Netflix outage, but I also noticed that I was unable to reach Google.com at the same time. I didn't bother to use traceroute to track down the problem because it went away by the time I finished disabling the AAAA records for all my domains....

    Then I read this story, and sure enough, Google showed a huge spike in outage reports at exactly the same time as Netflix. Unless Netflix uses the Google cloud for hosting (AFAIK, they use AWS, not Google), I'd imagine that this outage involved some sort of Akamai DNS problem or network routing problem or something else not specific to Netflix.

    • I tried to "Check out [your] sci-fi trilogy at PatriotsBooks.com [patriotsbooks.com]." Got "server not found".

      You might want to take a look at whether one of your income sources is also affected.

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Thanks for the heads up. I made a mass change to the DNS servers for all my domains recently to remove two old DNS server IPs as I phase out my old ISP, and I forgot that two of my domains are hosted by DreamHost/CloudFlare when I did the mass change. That wouldn't have been a big deal, except that when I set up CloudFlare, I foolishly disabled those two domains on my main DNS server. As a result, when I pointed all the WhoIS records at my own DNS server, it didn't respond at all. :-/

        I've reenabled the

  • That headline... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Grim Beefer ( 946632 ) on Saturday October 01, 2016 @05:19PM (#52995485)

    You know...I'm kind of sick of the whole attitude that services we pay for, for entertainment value, are supposed to be held to lower standards of accountability. People are allowed to be displeased if ANY service they pay for faces unscheduled interruption. It doesn't matter if the purpose of that service is a leisure activity, business is business. The snark around "real life" is just a way to downplay the situation due to the presumed lack of importance for the activity itself.

    Some people's work schedules, routines, etc. only allow for a bit of entertainment at certain hours of the day, each week, and it could really suck if that thing you paid for in advance isn't working, when you just want to relax after work, or whatever. God help you if you have younger children who often work a certain episode of their favorite TV show into a routine request.

    For reasons like these, and countless more, people pay Netflix to deliver content.

    • Be prepared. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Saturday October 01, 2016 @05:48PM (#52995619) Homepage

      God help you if you have younger children who often work a certain episode of their favorite TV show into a routine request.

      For such a highly critical use (I'm not joking here) if you only rely 100% on Netflix and don't have any disaster recovery strategy in place, you get what your deserve.

      Said as the older sibling. The arrival of DVD - a digital media that can be much more easily and reliably copied as video tapes - was a god send back then.
      Most of the parent I know nowadays have media servers at home with local copy of all the "mission critical" movies/tv series.
      And local copies downloaded on a tablet.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Why do people have kids? It sounds horrible.

        Mission-critical movies, indeed. Why would anyone freely choose to be in a position where they must provide a such a steady stream of entertainment or suffer nerve-wrecking abuse from little attention-gluttons?

        Really that is just one tiny example of the cultural narrative that comes out in our media. People seem to think it is funny that brats dominate their lives, and their finances, not to mention bring new diseases home every other week, and create legal lia

      • Ok...it sounds like you're telling me that I should purchase backup media of things I already pay to stream. "Getting what I deserve", in your view, is apparently not getting the service I paid for.

        That being said... my point was not that we should be overly critical of Netflix for suffering outages. I wasn't personally affected by this outage, and am not coming from that point of view.

        My point was that just because Netflix is an entertainment service, that doesn't mean they should be held to lower standard

        • Ok...it sounds like you're telling me that I should purchase backup media of things I already pay to stream.

          Saddly, that's the exact current situation.
          You do NOT own a copy of the medium, what you OWN is simply an authorisation to stream it.
          At any point of time you could lose access to this media
          (same with DRM'ed e-books auto-erasing themselves from e-readers, etc.)
          You do not own a movie, you own the right to stream when available.

          The better solution for things that you *absolutely desperately need available under any circumstance*, is to OWN a copy of the media, and then exercice the *Fair Use* exception granted

          • I understand most of the points you're making, but I think you're on a tangent of sorts. I'm not arguing that Netflix is more important than crucial healthcare infrastructure, or even basic utility services (like my garbage collection example).

            My argument is that the relative importance, function, or price, of a service is entirely, utterly, 100% irrelevant, for the same exact reason that it's entirely irrelevant
            what the purpose, function, or price, of a consumer good is, in valuing consumer rights.

            If you p

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      God help you if you have younger children who often work a certain episode of their favorite TV show into a routine request.

      Oh yes, the HORROR that they might not get their fix, or have to *GASP* read a book or be bored for once in their lives. OMG OMG how will they survive??

      -

      For reasons like these, and countless more, people pay Netflix to deliver content.

      FFS, get a grip- nothing works 100% of the time. How pathetic that people act like this is the end of the world or on par with nuclear war. Go outside, read a book, masturbate, organize your sock drawer....stop being such a cringeworthy TV addict. How did you even manage to live before Netflix? I predate the internet, so old farts like me just go, "Eh" and

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ultranova ( 717540 )

        How pathetic that people act like this is the end of the world or on par with nuclear war.

        So who's acting that way? Or are you simply trying to set up a strawman to distract from Netflix's failure to deliver what its customers pay it for?

        I predate the internet, so old farts like me just go, "Eh" and find something else to do.

        Thinking other people's problems are insignificant because you don't share them is an equal opportunity character flaw. Don't blame it on your age.

        Get a hobby, get a girlfriend, set f

        • Re:That headline... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday October 02, 2016 @11:08AM (#52998951) Journal

          So who's acting that way?

          The user named "Grim Beefer", to whom I was replying, that's who. And I'm sure there are plenty of others (or do you think he was the only one having a hissy fit about Netflix being down?).

          -

          Or are you simply trying to set up a strawman to distract from Netflix's failure to deliver what its customers pay it for?

          If this happened all the time or even frequently then I'd say you'd have a perfectly valid good reason to whine, but Netfix in general seems to be very reliable overall. Yes, of course people should get what they pay for, but as I said earlier, "Get a grip, nothing works 100% of the time". Netflix, the Holy Portal of Content (blessed be its name) is no fucking different. This isn't like they're cutting off your insulin or oxygen, it just means you won't be able to jerk off to Luke Cage or Stranger Things for an hour or so.

          -

          Those are mighty words for someone spending their weekend whining about other people on Slashdot.

          Lol, I'm more-or-less retired so by law I can whine about whatever I want, whenever I want. Yeah- while you're getting up and slogging your way into your lame-ass monkey job, I'm sleeping in. When you're having the life sucked out of you in a pointless, soul-crushing meeting, I'm having a sandwich or doing one of my hobbies or reading a book or taking a walk or writing or coding or shopping or visiting friends or whatever the fuck I wanna do, and that includes whining if I feel like it. :)

          So na na boo boo, honey buns.

    • Now I'll say that some people go WAY overboard with the amount of pissed off they get at an inconvenience but simply being annoyed and complaining is perfectly normal. When you pay for a service, you expect that service to be available when you want it during whatever its scheduled hours are, which for many services is 24/7. If it isn't, you have reason to be annoyed. Not outraged, but annoyed and wanting them to fix it.

      What's funny to me is the geeks that are hating on Netflix and acting like you should't

    • When have we ever had reliable service of ANY kind, especially with entertainment? Broadcast TV is out regularly. Cable TV is unreliable, the scheduled times of programs are regularly interrupted for trivialities like football, power outages affect everyone, etc.

    • It's ok to be mad, but keep in mind that the engineers of an entertainment service deliberately did not engineer it to be five 9s reliable BECAUSE it's entertainment. They knew they could save a tremendous amount of money by designing it for a lower tier of reliability. Also, you paid only $9 a month, less than the cost of a plain old phone line(which is that reliable), for streaming HD video of thousands of titles AND the production of new content. As long as it only goes down for a few hours a year, yo

  • Hah, jokes on them. I got Amazon Prime too.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01, 2016 @05:36PM (#52995561)

    I was binge watching Lost for the third time in a row when ti went down. I got so angry that I threw my tablet down in a huff, and then went to figure out why my children were crying. Turns out they were hungry for the last 4 days! Ingrates.

  • wont work on my mac, but works on my wife's iPad same network......curious

  • on Netflix. When your done binge watching this season I don't see what the heck you'd do with it.
  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday October 01, 2016 @08:16PM (#52996113)

    Outages are a clear example of why streaming services are bad. If Netflix downloaded entire episodes, seasons or series when you watched them, it would be different because you could have a substantial amount of content stored locally. Unfortunately, Netflix will not do this and the very DRM happy entertainment industry will not allow this. With their original content, they could enable local caching but they have chosen to not. Streaming is a bad model.

    • Yeah, just what I need, a room full of DVDs to schlep around.

      Streaming is a bad model.

      Works okay for water and electricity, storage is a pain in the ass. Same goes for anything else that doesn't fit in the overhead compartment. Streaming is the best thing since the microwave oven.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        His alternative was digital downloads, not DVDs. But you'd known that if you'd read more than the title.

    • Amazon Prime Video allows downloads

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The lawn, the trees, a few broken sprinklers and the shrubbery needed attention - maybe it was a conspiracy from Mother Nature to get off my backside and work in the yard? =)

  • by Anonymous Coward

    ... with the summary? Not a single word about how "people" are "freaking out" or "discovering real life". This site has turned into a joke in recent years. Do they only hire absolute cretins for compiling these "news"? It makes me furious to know that somebody is getting paid for what I could do a million times better.

  • Netflix cut off Linux PCs by demanding Silverlight. I purchased a Roku unit and now I can Netflix myself until I'm silly or my eyes are burned out. However it still bothers me that Netflix does not treat Linux users well.
    • by pnutjam ( 523990 )
      Netflix work fine with chrome, on OpenSuSE and I hear Ubuntu, probably any linux. Now let me tell you about HBO go...

      It worked, but hey stopped it.
  • No problems here, but real life really sucks!

I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.

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