Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, Netflix users have been reporting outages amid unprecedented demand for its streaming library.
Although the issues appear to be abating at the time of writing, the Down Detector website saw a surge of users reporting issues on Wednesday afternoon, heading into the evening.
A higher than usual number of reports are still being made by viewers, suggesting problems are still ongoing.
The live outage map shows the concentration of outages in the main population centres in Western Europe and the United States. However, right now we’re having no problems in watching Jaws for the 4,000th time.
In a post on its Help website, the company had previously writes: “Due to the COVID-19 crisis thousands of our customer support agents are now having to work from home, making it harder to support your calls. So we are seeing higher than normal wait times. To deal with this situation we are now offering live chat and online Help Center support only. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience. Learn more.”
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However, while writing this article the status cycled this comment and a message claiming the service is up and running once again. The company hasn’t acknowledged the problems on the @Netflixhelps Twitter account or any of its other platforms, so the cause for the interruption remains a mystery.
Over the last few days the company had vowed to lower the quality of streams in an effort to ensure European internet providers were not overwhelmed by the demand. The decision came at the behest of the European Union and saw the likes of Amazon and YouTube follow suit. For most users it’ll probably mean a downtick in quality to SD streaming.
Netflix said: “We estimate this will reduce Netflix traffic on European networks by around 25 percent while also ensuring a good quality service for our members.”
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
