Category: Technology Author : JR Posted: August 25, 2008
Tags : netflix
Netflix says a piece of hardware is to blame for its recent shipping outage.
The company’s head of IT operations says a “key faulty hardware component” caused its distribution system to crash two weeks ago today — and to further confound things, he says it “reported no detectable errors.” That’s what had engineers so baffled at the beginning. No details about the specifics of the hardware are being released.
Many customers didn’t receive DVDs for several days as a result of the glitch. Netflix was able to get its systems partially up fairly quickly, though, and now reports being back up to full-speed with its processing.
Aug 25, 2008
Interesting that they blame one piece of hardware, when it looks like all Netflix's distribution centers were out of commission for a time. Unless they took the others offline until they identified the problem, or they have multiple instances of that one piece of hardware. Still smells like a software issue…
Aug 26, 2008
Awful reporting. Nowhere did they say that the system crashed. What they said was that a database corruption issue was detected. Therefore, the outage was intentional — they had to shut down the system, migrate a known-good snapshot to new hardware, and replay the logs. This takes a heck of a lot of time because you're basically provisioning your IT infrastructure from scratch.