Netflix glitch takes down site, delays deliveries

The Netflix Web site was down for 12 hours on Monday, and the company says the problem took out both its logistics and delivery systems.s.

Problems began around 7am Pacific time Monday, when customers began seeing a message stating "The Netflix Web site is temporarily unavailable." The outage continued until about 7pm Pacific time.

Netflix is so far staying silent about what caused the problem, although its length caused the company to miss a deadline to mail movies to customers. It reported that some movies still made it out, although the majority will be mailed on Tuesday.

The company has seen its share of outages, including an 18-hour one in July, the longest in its history. However, at that time it was only the Web site that was down, and not the backend which runs its shipping business.

No data was lost during the outage, Netflix says, so customers' queues should be unaffected. The only issue many may notice is a delay in the delivery of discs. The company gave no guidance on how many of its 7.5 million subscribers would be affected.

The outage came at a bad time for the company: it was enjoying a rally on Wall Street where its stock had reached a 52-week high on news of Blockbuster deciding to focus on their retail business.

Blockbuster had been a major competitor to the company, and both spent -- and lost -- significant amounts of money attempting to one-up each other.