August 15th, 2008
Netflix back to normal; promises Saturday night movies and 15 percent off.
Netflix, crippled by an outage that kept it from shipping movie DVDs to its customers for the better part of the week, says it has resumed normal operations. Millions of customers receive their DVDs by Saturday and the company, in a blog entry (below), said it will apply a 15 percent credit to the accounts of customers affected by the outage. The entry reads (in full):
Let’s get right to it. This morning, we’re happy to report that all of our shipping centers are resuming normal operations after experiencing three days of significant issues. Throughout the night and as we post this update, our distribution centers are processing customer orders and getting them into the mail. If a member should have been shipped a disc Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, with rare exception it will ship today (Friday). As a result, millions of our members will receive DVDs on Saturday, in time (we hope) for some weekend movie enjoyment. But we know that’s not enough. The service interruption we experienced this week inconvenienced many of our members and put us in the awful position of disappointing people. So we’re taking added measures. For all members whose shipments have been delayed, we’ll be automatically applying a 15% credit to their next billing statement. Or, for new members whose first shipments have been delayed, we’ll automatically extend their free trial by a week. Rest assured that we are taking aggressive steps to fully understand the root cause of this week’s problems and safeguard against issues like these in the future. For now, we’re just happy to be able to get back to doing what we love most – delighting our customers. Again, most sincere apologies and thanks for your understanding.
Some initial feedback on Netflix’s blog - aside from a handful who are breaking down the value of the 15 percent credit - indicates that Netflix’s customer base is pretty forgiving, considering this is not the first outage. An outage in March took the Web site down for 11 hours and halted deliveries for one day. In July 2007, the site went down for 18 hours but deliveries were not delayed.
Related: Netflix may love $1.8M to $3.6M in revenue per day over outage.
Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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