The Pot and The Kettle

Here at Pot 'N Kettle, we are closely - CLOSELY - tracking this story. The Netflix website has been down since last night (Monday). Frequent visits to the website have issued times when it was expected to be up and running again. Those times seem to be changing continuously. Originally, the website was to back live Monday, then early Tuesday morning, now we are looking Tuesday afternoon. Currently, the website is not even giving a time when it expects to be back up, only the following message:

The Netflix web site is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes you. Please visit us again soon. You can contact Netflix Customer Service at 1-888-638-3549.

Curiouser and curiouser. Apparently the website went down as Netflix was updating its computers to reflect price drops. If the price of my subscription drops, I will probably overlook this whole thing. I have a feeling it won't though. We'll see. Or maybe we won't see anytime soon. The price drop will only be for new customers or some other bogus idea.

In an article from the washingtonpost.com, one can find the following bits of news as well: To make matters worse [falling stocks], Netflix's Web site _ the hub of its rental system _ went down Monday evening and remained inaccessible as of Tuesday afternoon (EDT). Spokesman Steve Swasey attributed the outage to an unanticipated problem that he declined to describe. Engineers hoped to fix the trouble by 2 p.m. EDT.

I am not going to criticize Netflix's customer service just yet, because I find its website pretty top-notch on the whole, and they almost always respond to my emails. Its speediness has frustrated me in the past, however; as the website has chosen to either not reflect returns they have received from me, and/or decided to ship me movies days later than they should have, from obscure locations (Tacoma, Seattle, Sante Fe, what have you).

Today they should have received from The Diary of Anne Frank - which was ok, if angelic Anne Frank was a tickle grating. Shelley Winters somehow won an Oscar for an amazingly minimal role. Even if the website is down, I would imagine they could still process my new movie, right? We'll see, but I am not optimistic. Tomorrow they should receive from me The Departed and All of Me. My parents have had The Departed for a relatively short amount of time - for them - as they tend to ask me for good movies, only to never watch them, and then screw up everything. All of Me was a horrible mess, but I couldnt help wanting to know how it ended. Alas.

Updates soon. This is more exciting than the NYC pipe explosion coverage. This is the kind of slip that may make me go running to Blockbuster. Just kidding! I would never revert to that infringement franchise! Long Live Netflix.

Labels: blockbuster, netflix, website crash