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Netflix Gives Members 3% Credit To Make Up for Downtime

Sunday night, some Netflix users experienced an outage of the company’s streaming services. While this might happen from time to time, this particular time it sent many customers into a fury of ...
Netflix Gives Members 3% Credit To Make Up for Downtime
Written by Chris Crum
  • Sunday night, some Netflix users experienced an outage of the company’s streaming services. While this might happen from time to time, this particular time it sent many customers into a fury of outrage, because not only was it down for hours for some of them, but it came just on the heels of recently announced price hikes.

    If you’re unfamiliar with that part of the story, Netflix announced last week that users who want to continue to get both the streaming service and the DVD-by-mail service (one at a time) would have to pay 60% more than they are currently paying for the same thing. Hard to believe not everybody was happy right?

    In fact, a lot of members were already irate before that due to a recent redesign, though they announced a few tweaks in an attempt to appease members right before they dropped the pricing bomb.

    Suffice it to say that many of the company’s customers have not been the happiest in recent weeks, and the outage of the streaming service at a time when most (who aren’t leaving the service entirely) are probably leaning toward dropping the DVD plan and just going with the streaming plan, just didn’t sit well.

    As previously reported, customers let the company know on its Facebook page. Now, Netflix is offering a 3% credit for the next billing cycle to make up for the lost time. Last night, I got the following email in my inbox:

    Netflix gives credit

    I don’t know if this is going to make all members feel better about the whole situation, including knowing that their entertainment experience is vulnerable to outages at any given time, but at least it’s something.

    GigaOm’s Ryan Lawler points to a tweet indicating that Netflix has just hired former Reddit Chief Architect Jeremy Edberg, as its new “Lead Cloud Reliability Engineer”:

    Here for my first day at @netflix leading up the new cloud reliability team! Wanna come join me (we’re hiring)? 18 hours ago via Twitter for Mac · powered by @socialditto

    As you can see from the tweet, they appear to be looking for some help for him as well, so that at least indicates that they’re serious about preventing such outages in the future. That’s going to be incredibly important if they’re trying to phase out DVDs, as the common thinking suggests that they are.

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