it’s unix, not eunuchs

I just noticed that the Netflix Watch Instantly Service is down. I find users at Ars Technica complaining about it here and also users complaining inside Netflix’s forums here. I suppose this is one potential downside to the ultra-cheap Netflix Streaming Player that only caches 64MB. If Netflix sold a hard drive based player then you could ride through outages like this by watching 10 films or a hundred films that you had already downloaded.

I called and spoke to a customer service rep and was pleased with the experience. It was my second time dealing with Netflix Customer Service and both calls were answered with very little call tree nonsense. I just entered a 6 digit customer number they have assigned to me and I was talking to Neil in about a minute, just like the first time I called for something else. Just as I called, the system came back up, so I asked Neil about it and he said that yes, the server had been down earlier, but that everything should be working good now.

And oh yeah, don’t do what I was doing at one point.  Don’t keep hitting the refresh key, you just refresh the outage web page, which apparently may be accessible even when the service is back up.  Instead click out to the main netflix page and then click Watch Instantly again.