Netflix's Web site suffers brief outage

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.