Ireland had its potato famine. Northeast China had its drought. But mass deprivation reached new heights yesterday when, for around half an hour, Americans were denied their Netflix.
A fateful message appeared on computer and television screens across the country at around 9 p.m. eastern time, according to Consumerist. It was some variation on, "Netflix site error: We were unable to process your request." As far as the victims of this outage, they are too numerous to mention. For our part, we know a couple people who were binging on "Dexter" and "Peaky Blinders," and we can only assume they suffered terribly during the 30 minute outage. Because this kind of downtime hasn't really been an issue for Netflix in the past, there's no rulebook for users on how to bide the time if and when an outage occurs. And so, for around half an hour, we imagine that people lived out the kind of nightmare that was once only confined to Gary Larson comics.
Tracing the impact of the outage
Since its founding in 1997, Netflix has morphed from a rental service to a streaming service to a content-producing machine of its own, and in that time it's become the default mechanism for film and television viewing in the U.S. As of Oct. 15, there were 53 million Netflix subscribers, 36 million of whom live in the U.S. Every month, the service's users spend around one billion hours watching content. Given that statistic, it logically follows that during the 30 minute outage, hundreds of thousands of hours of watching "Gilmore Girls" and "Locked Up Abroad" were forever lost. So yeah, it was a big deal.
But how on earth did it happen? Before last night, Netflix was like the perfect partner: a force and a prop and a stay in our lives, something that never abandoned us, especially in our times of dire need. But where were you last night, Netflix, when I needed you the most? Are you trying to send me some message? Are you suggesting I take you for granted?
Actually, a little research reveals that there's no need to take the whole thing personally.
What goes on behind the scenes
Netflix may beam movie magic onto your televisions and computers, but there's nothing magical about what happens behind the scenes to keep this vast enterprise running. As a TechHive article pointed out, Netflix's operational infrastructure has transformed in recent years to accommodate its massive growth. Whereas at one point the company leveraged third party providers to regulate content, it now runs its own content delivery network. It also has a group of hard drive systems that are specially designed for handling video streaming needs.
These systems "cram 36 3.5-inch drives into a server about 6 inches high (four rack units) and 2 feet deep," TechHive reported. "The servers each store 100TB of data and stream between 10,000 and 20,000 movies simultaneously … There are about 1,000 of the storage systems total in its network."
Within its server network, Netflix has built in certain precautionary measures that specifically address the problems that could arise with video streaming. The servers, for instance, feature spinning disks that help to reduce the kind of overheating that could prevent videos from streaming properly.
At the end of the day, though, Netflix is a company that exists in the physical, not virtual world, and sometimes in this world machinery stalls, putters out or breaks. For now, we can again enjoy unfettered access to our favorite TV shows. But if downtime occurs in the future, perhaps we can use it as an opportunity to – who knows – maybe pick up a book.
