Netflix Experiences Temporary Outages Across U.S., Europe

Click here to read the full article.

UPDATED: Netflix’s streaming service was unavailable Wednesday to some users for about an hour, the company confirmed.

“Some of our members in the U.S. and Europe were unable to use Netflix via our website for around an hour this morning,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement to Variety, sent at about 1:35 p.m. ET. “The issue is now fixed and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.”

More from Variety

According to website DownDetector, user complaints of problems accessing Netflix spiked a little after 12:30 p.m. ET. The site showed error reports across the U.S. in the Northeast, Southern California, the Pacific Northwest and Texas, as well as parts of Northern Europe. About 41% of the issues reported were related to having “no connection” to Netflix, and another 34% were related to problems with video streaming. The reports of problems with Netflix on DownDetector had largely subsided by 1:30 p.m. ET.

Netflix users on social media had said they were seeing error messages when they tried to access Netflix, including “Error NSES-500,” which the company says on its help site “typically points to a network connectivity issue that is preventing your device from reaching the Netflix service.” In a tweet responding to a customer reporting an error message, Netflix’s customer-support team said, “We are currently looking into this situation and working towards a fix.”

The issues cropped up as millions of people across the U.S. and Europe are homebound during the coronavirus crisis, with usage of video-streaming services surging in the past week. For example, AT&T said it had record-high levels of Netflix traffic on March 20-21.

Best of Variety

Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.