Since its first original series premiered (House of Cards, circa 2013), Netflix has transformed the small screen, giving the average weeknight the potential to be pretty extraordinary. The streaming service has evolved into more of a culture than a service; even its name is now frequently used as a verb.

So you can imagine that when something goes wrong that doesn’t allow users to “Netflix”  and binge on the highly anticipated Luke Cage release, it would cause some commotion.

What Happened

Throughout the duration between October 1 at approximately 3pm, and October 3 at approximately 6pm, many errors occurred and users were not able to access the site.

Most of the errors were 503, or Service Unavailable, errors. This means the servers weren’t able to handle the request, however, there were not as many requests as we had expected.

It’s important to note that the screenshot of the site shown in the chart above is blank.

If we were lucky to get the page during the outage, we were not able to interact with it. Document complete did not fire because ichnaea.netflix.com was unable to fulfill our request. Our agent waited for about 30 seconds before the test timed out.

Netflix maintained an open communication with users via Twitter, letting them know they were aware of the issue and working to resolve it.

Unfortunately, by the time Netflix announced they were back up and running on Tuesday morning, users already vented their frustration on social media.

Outages are very real reminders of how critical a proactive user experience monitoring strategy is to virtually every company. The digital experience is restructuring the way today’s businesses must run. It’s understood that sometimes downtime is inevitable; if you can catch the issues before your users are impacted, though, you can mitigate the risk of losing revenue and damaging your brand reputation.