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December 1, 2008 4:05 PM PST

Netflix's Web site suffers brief outage

by Greg Sandoval

Netflix suffered a nearly hour long site outage on Monday, the company confirmed.

The site went down at about 3:40 p.m. PT and Netflix posted this note to the site's front door at about 4 p.m.:

"We're sorry, the Netflix website is temporarily unavailable. Our shipping centers are continuing to send and receive DVDs , so your movies will be processed as usual. And you can still instantly watch movies via your Netflix ready device."

Netflix has suffered several costly outages in the past year. A hardware glitch prevented the company from shipping DVDs to customers for several days in August. A malfunction at the company in March also delayed shipments.

In what is likely an unrelated event, some users of the Netflix Player by Roku have complained for two weeks of receiving dramatically inferior video quality in the movies Netflix streams via the Roku box. Roku executives told me they suspect the source of the problem is Netflix's content distribution network (CDN). Netflix's Swasey said the company is investigating.

Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET.
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by ywkhgqo December 1, 2008 7:07 PM PST
i've noticed bad quality on my laptop. I've tried it on two different connections.
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by jag0 December 1, 2008 7:21 PM PST
Ummm...slow news day?
Reply to this comment
by txchap December 2, 2008 5:25 AM PST
I have seen the same problem watching movies over my Xbox. I was able to watch a movie a few weeks ago with no problem, but now I only get one dot of quality and the picture is horrible. I called Netflix to see if they were aware of this issue affecting Xbox units and he was not even aware of this issue..........
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by Malli22 December 2, 2008 7:41 AM PST
I've had the same problem. I was able to watch video fine on my Xbox before Thanksgiving but haven't been able to since. Oddly, I was able to watch the same video on my laptop.
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