Netflix Suffers Shipment Issues

Los Angeles DVD rental service Netflix Inc. said on Thursday the most severe system outage in its history was preventing shipments of discs to about a third of its 8.4 million customers. The company said it shipped no DVDs on Tuesday, some on Wednesday and none so far on Thursday.

Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said the company would provide credits to affected customers and was working "feverishly" to determine the cause of the outage and fix the problem.

It is only the second time in Netflix's history it was unable to ship DVDs due to a technical glitch, said Swasey, adding that this outage was worse than one in March, which was caused by an entirely different problem, which the company has since resolved.

Netflix resumed shipping DVDs on March 25, one day after a technological breakdown knocked out its site for much of the prior day, and offered 5% discounts on bills to members who did not receive DVDs because of that outage.

"This time, the site's been up but our shipping system is down. It's worse than it was in March. We're really backlogged," Swasey said.

Netflix sent e-mails to people who were due to receive discs and were unable to get them.