By Dan McDermott
The Lynchburg Times
Oh, how quickly they fall.
For years revered by employees and customers alike, the reputation of Netflix has gone (as Moody’s might put it) from AAA to junk.
Less than one week after announcing a 60% price increase that prompted tens of thousands of complaints and threats of cancellation, the company’s streaming service has gone down in many parts of the country for over 5 hours so far.
Netflix has not issued any notice of the outage on its blog, Twitter accounts or on the company’s Facebook page, which as of this writing has over 76,000 comments on its last post, almost all trashing the company for the price increase and/or the outage.
Ever eager to immerse myself in a story, I tried to login to my Netflix account and was told my password didn’t work. I went through the process to change it and still couldn’t get in. Next I tried to watch on my Netflix widget-enabled Vizio tv. No luck. The TV app said it couldn’t connect and directed me to a Netflix page that directed me to call Vizio. They’ll be pleased.
All of the extra hires Netflix brought on to handle the complaints about the July 12 price hike were not enough to keep up Sunday. The phone was busy for hours. If a caller was lucky enough to get through, it was only to hear a recording saying to call back later.
Comments on the internet were hot and heavy, especially since Netflix PR folks appear to be hiding in their cubicles instead of relaying any information to the public.
We noticed one especially exasperated Facebook commenter had posted the office and cell phone numbers of Netflix VP for Communications Steve Swasey.
Swasey didn’t answer his phone but did respond to our text message by texting us not to text him but to send him an email. We did. If we get a response we’ll update this post.
Dan McDermott is publisher of The Lynchburg Times, Warren County Report and Frederick County report. He also hosts a nightly web tv show called McDermott Report. You can find him on Google Plus.
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