Sooo, here’s why Netflix was broken on Thursday

If you, like thousands of people across the U.S., experienced an excruciating Netflix outage this Thursday, the culprit has finally been named: not hackers. I repeat, it was not a hacker’s fault this time, really, I promise. It was a very boring internal server issue. Sorry to all my favorite conspiracy theorists out there. You’ll get ’em next time, boo.

UltraDNS, the content delivery service employed by a number of major websites including Uber, Expedia and BBC (and my boyfriend, Netflix), announced last night that the 90 minute outage across most of their major client platforms was due to a technical server error and not, as they originally suspected, a Denial of Service attack.

So what is a “DoS” attack?  I know, that sounds very intense. I have zero inherent ability with technology but sometimes I like to pretend that I’m a badass hacker who wears a lot of leather and like, rides an all-black moped. Or something. Anyway, a DoS attack occurs when hackers overload a service with such crazy heavy traffic that the system crashes. Apparently, a lot of these DoS situations have been coming from China against “China-specific” sites, so all the techie humans are on high alert.

Although I was mercifully still at work when the outage occurred — because it happened in the middle of the afternoon and I am kind of an adult — I was still enraged at the thought of 90 whole Netflix minutes, wasted.

That’s 1.5 Netflix and Chills, gone.

2.25 episodes of Gilmore Girls, lost forever.

3.33 installments of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, unwatched.

Get your act together, UltraDNS. I can’t be more specific because I’m still confused by what it is you DO, exactly, but I know you’re not doing what you do as well as you should be doing it.

(Paramount Pictures)