The Netflix API feels like a ghetto. I'm surprised people are still developing apps for it. When you read through comments on its various pages, there isn't a lot of activity.
It's a problem that services like Netflix and Last.fm never consider could happen and when it does they are scrambling everywhere and don't know how to deal with the flames properly, stuff just looks broken. What I have been doing the past year is creating basic html pages for every service I release as an emergency landing page that I easily put up at the press of a button.
Actually the other comment from b0b0b0b is pretty accurate - Netflix tries to gracefully degrade functionality when 'stuff goes down', so that people can still get the basic streaming service. Netflix also uses Chaos Monkey (http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/chaos-monkey-how-n...)
Yesterday, a friend called me and wanted my help. Apparently NetFlix wasn't working on his 360, and it kept rejected his password on the PC, even right after he set it. He was in a panic and refused to listen to me that their service was probably having problems.
I wonder how long he spent messing with it instead of contacting them, or just listening to me. :D
Streaming Netflix still works from MAC/PC, but personalized recommendations are absent from the front page.
So I think this is a win in terms of decoupled services and degraded mode functionality.
I expect they probably pushed out some code too hastily due to the recent licensing hoo-hah with the media companies (and can't just roll back because of said hoo-hah).
OTOH, on the Apple TV it just said "Netflix is unavailable" when you picked that option. And it didn't work at all in the iOS app, just a white screen on app launch. So decoupling / degrading only works great if you apply it to every platform.
It's sluggish to begin with. With the AutoScroll Chrome plugin (which I use because the Linux Chrome distro doesn't have middle-mouse scroll for some insane reason) it completely breaks it. (The AutoScroll plugin adds a div somewhere that completely breaks posterous sites.)
Success is the intersection of luck and opportunity. Unfortunately, in this case, luck was not on your side. That being said, genius is merely persistence in disguise. Your app very well may recover, but if it doesn't, keep at it and start the next one.
