
Netflix site is down - tomerific
http://outage.report/netflix
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jaytaylor
Question:

Given the relatively limited amount of static content they distribute, and
what seem like only daily updates, how is there not a switch they can flip
when things go south to spin the service up in another region or on another
provider?

Seems like it'd be the logical thing to do given AWS is always going to have
another outage, and NFLX has lots of time and smart engineers to plan and
prepare for these eventualities..

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bbarn
I think you might underestimate the scale here. It's more like, it's "always
on, in all regions, with as many providers as they can". This is a company
that's had to innovate in basically every possible business space it can to
keep delivering what it has been.

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tracker1
It's also not entirely static, there's a lot of checks in place because of
licensing models, and beyond that there's different encoding and quality
levels of streams to support various clients.

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jaytaylor
I understand the site isn't static, but fundamentally what they are serving
are static video streams. Encoding for video streams of varying quality levels
is entirely pre-computed, and thus seem like static assets. Anyways, my gripe
is that I am not seeing the good reason(s) for not having a _working_ failover
plan ready to go at all times for the service driving a publicly traded
company. Even scale doesn't seem like a good reason, as I'm sure Google GCE
would _love_ to get a few slices of the Netflix pie. So I'm just left
perplexed..

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teraflop
Obviously they do have a failover plan, but no plan is infallible --
especially when it involves a complex distributed software system plus human
decision-making.

You never notice all the times when the failover is executed smoothly with no
interruption in service, just the times when something goes wrong.

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seanp2k2
And I promise that there are fail overs, simulations, testing, smaller issues,
moving loads around, etc happening _all_ the time behind the scenes. Getting
caught out is no fun, but it's a very low percentage of the times when
changing the tires on the bus driving down the freeway just goes [mostly]
without a hitch.

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Aelinsaar
It's still down too... on a Saturday night they must be absolutely hounded
with complaints.

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freyir
Working fine on my end.

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kpcyrd
Meta: why does [https://outage.report](https://outage.report) redirect to
[http://outage.report](http://outage.report) ?

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foepys
I have heard that some sites reported a 30% decline in ad revenue as soon as
they started using HTTPS. I don't know the reason for this, tough.

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captn3m0
The reason is probably because not all ad-networks support https, and it you
can't make the same money on HTTPS-only ads (since fewer networks will bid on
it). Putting up an HTTP ad would guarantee now that it is not seen, so
sticking back to http makes sense that way.

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mali9
Does Netflix have a standard status dashboard like other services do ?

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trimbo
Do any consumer sites have that? Seems like more of an enterprise-SLA type
thing.

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ncphillips
Interesting, I cannot login on their website, but I can access it on my phone.

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cesarbs
I'm having fun watching the outrage on the Twitter feed.

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UnoriginalGuy
It appears as if it just came back up for my region. Literally in the last
five minutes.

Obviously people's mileage may vary, since it could be region dependant.

