Netflix: Faulty Hardware Took Us Down

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.

Netflix