Netflix experienced a site outage Thursday that took down Netflix.com and its Watch Instantly streaming service.
"Thanks for your tweets. The site is back up but we're aware that people are still having issues watching instantly. We're working to fix it," Netflix wrote in a Thursday afternoon tweet.
Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for information about what caused the service interruption.
Visitors to Netflix.com were met with a "Netflix Site Error" message, which said the company was unable to process your request. The Netflix iPhone app also displayed a message that said "Error. Problem Loading movies."
The outage comes one day after Netflix said it was thinking about launching a streaming-only option in the U.S. in the fourth quarter.
"Our success with our pure streaming offering in Canada at $7.99 has encouraged us to test this model in the USA," Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings said in a Wednesday earnings statement. "If our results are as strong as we think they will be, then we will look to start this offering later in this Q4."
"Pure streaming could become our core offering in the USA, and DVD would be offered as a supplement for an additional charge, like we offer Blu-ray today," he continued. "We'll know by the holiday season if consumers would prefer this more streaming-centric approach."
Though Netflix still spends between $500 million and $600 million each year mailing its DVDs to customers, Hastings said its future was streaming.
"By every measure, we are now a streaming company, which also offers DVD-by-mail," he said in a statement. "In Q4, we'll spend more on streaming content than DVD content, and we'll deliver many more hours of entertainment via streaming than on DVD."
A Thursday report from Sandvine said that Netflix accounts for more than 20 percent of all downstream Internet traffic during peak times in the U.S.