Netflix Website Experiences Outage

Online DVD rental website Netflix suffered major technical troubles Monday, leading to an outage of more than 11 hours.

The website was unreachable to its 7.5 million subscribers from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST, said company spokesman Steve Swasey.

Even though Netflix did not indicate the facts of the technical problems, the company said that the issue may be a database problem that might also delay DVD deliveries.

During the outage, Netflix posted this message on its home page: “Our site is temporarily down. We’re working hard to get the site up as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.”

In a twist of satire, the outage happened as stock analysts were upgrading shares of Netflix based on strong site traffic. Piper Jaffray analyst Michael J. Olson says Netflix’s traffic saw an increase of 18 percent in the last three months, compared with a decrease of six percent at competitor DVD rental site, Blockbuster’s Total Access.