Have you noticed that I've been inserting the "Site Status" over there on the top right side of this blog (see it?). We usually know about upcoming maintenance issues and stuff like that so we can sometimes provide some heads-up about site issues. Then again, there was yesterday.

The core Netflix website is unusually solid, but some of our new features operate independently, like the Sim%, like Friends. I guess i'm being less than candid to say we were down (actually, ARE down -- since we probably won't be back online until Wednesday) for maintenance. As you probably noticed, we turned on many of these new features (the new reviews structure, the avatars, etc.) with little fanfare. We wanted to slowly build up stress on the servers to make sure all was smooth before making a big deal about it. And it turns out that we slightly underestimated how many of y'all would jump on these features--which is good, but it creates a pretty significant load. So we rejigger once a week or so, improve code. Then we build new features on top of the foundation (for instance, the kinds of tools you -- and we-- really want to provide our community), and then check some more about how the servers are doing. Anyway, that's why we haven't yet made big announcements about our evolving set of new features. (We could put a big "Public Beta" up there on the top of the page, but isn't everything online a sort of public beta?) Anyway, this is why we've had some Friends Unavailable notices or you've had problems uploading avatars periodically over the past few weeks. We'll have this under control shortly. Until then, thanks for bearing with us. (Sleeplessly yours, The Friends Team)

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Still working on it, and Friends will likely be unavailable through Thursday, coming online probably on Friday or thereabouts. Watch this space for latest news. (the good news, should we chose to see the silver lining, is that we're using this opportunity to deploy a few new features, which we'll release once all this comes up again.)