Buzz Kill, No Netflix And Chill As Demand For Luke Cage May Have Brought Down NFLX

Netflix suffered a major outage on Saturday afternoon that began around 3:00 p.m. ET. The streaming service continued to have trouble for the next two and a half hours, coming back online around 5:30 p.m. ET. Netflix acknowledged the disruption in a Twitter post, but has yet to say what cased the trouble. Early speculation is that binge watching a couple of popular new shows might have been the issue.

One of those new shows is Marvel's Luke Cage. It features a "hoodie-wearing, unbreakable ex-con" with superhuman strength and unbreakable skin. He ends up an unlikely crime fighter, both to clear his name and to clean up his neighborhood. Netflix released all 13 episodes of the first season on Friday, September 30, 2016 to rave reviews (it has a 5/5-star rating on Netflix.).

The other popular new addition to Netflix's lineup is Amanda Knox, a documentary that reexamines the murder case she was involved in. It's not in the same vein as Making a Murderer, which chronicled the fascinating series of events following the exoneration of Steven Avery, but given the success of that show it's easy to understand why there would be such high interest in another crime-related documentary.

Whatever the reason, it left streaming subscribers having to come with up an alternative plan for Saturday afternoon. That works out to a lot of people—Netflix is the biggest streaming service in the nation, accounting for over half of all subscriptions (53 percent). Amazon is a distant second at 25 percent, followed by Hulu at 13 percent and HBO at just 1 percent, based on data from Strategy Analytics.