Netflix Website Down for "Scheduled Maintenance"

The Netflix website will be unavailable until 5:30am (ET) because of "scheduled maintenance."

Should Netflix announce scheduled maintenance in advance?

Comments

[jcschott]

I think that would be nice to display an advanced notice (Even the day of). It gets annoying when your watching a movie on instant watch and you can't finish it because netflix turns there website off.

[Old Timer Too]

Netflix needs to get their down time minimalized, especially if they are going to provide services like instant watching. Or, at the least, provide it via a different set of computers/site, one that isn't down for extended periods of time.

[MCWHAMMER]

Absolutely then need to warn users that the site will be going down AHEAD of time. Again, paid service, any time I can't use my paid service, I have a right to be disappointed. I appreciate them "going down" late night though, they need to do that every time.

[aliquidparadigm]

From what I can tell, they usually only go down Wednesday nights until 2:30 or 3:30am PST. No idea when it usually starts, though.

I don't feel like I'm being cheated or anything: even Amazon and eBay have momentary downtime. They have several millions of customers, whereas Netflix has, what, just over 7 million? And of those, most usually only use the website once or twice a week. It's not an incredibly high volume website, and it's completely devoid of ads, so it's not like they make money hand-over-fist or anything, and, really, how many people are inconvenienced by a two hour downtime in the middle of a Wednesday night?

[BoB]

The only sites that need to notify you are ones that have a "due date" associated with them.

Example is a credit card site. If you HAVE to pay your bill today, at the last minute, and they are down for maintanence, then you could incur a late fee.

My Opinion, YMMV.

[Edward R Murrow]

For companies that charge a monthly fee, downtimes should be minimal since the meter is always running for the customer.

[OdomZ]

A monthly fee to rent movies. Having the site down for a few hours every wednesday night is probably only a major hinderance to that for 0.001% of Netflix members. I am sure the vast majority of Netflix members never even notice that the site is ever down. I believe the site goes down around 11:00pm pacific time or 2:00am eastern time.

[Edward R Murrow]

So if the cab I'm riding in breaks down, the meter keeps running? That's exactly what it's like when the website crashes since I can't manage my account.

[Aaron]

The site was down this Friday at 1:30 AM, which was right when I was settling in to watch a movie online. Customer support tried to sell me the line that the Instant Watch service was not something I was being charged for, so no account credit would be given. So, I'm going to go log out of my Netflix account and see if I can use it for free, since it's apparently not part of my bill.

Also, the site has been down at 11:30 PST on a Wednesday night in the recent past.