I am saying that I am sure the level of vitriol being directed at Netflix right now via email or other anonymous/private communications channels is disproportionate relative to the otherwise high value that is derived from an $8/mo luxury purchase.
With tongue firmly in cheek I am urging calm in this moment of national crisis. In other words, it was a joke.
Anybody interested in tracking an outage in 2011 needs to know that twitter is accepted standard for communicating with your userbase.
It has the advantages of:
A) Not being your own infrastructure - You do not want to
use your own infrastructure to communicate a problem
with your own infrastructure.
B) Is inherently many-many.
C) Maintains an archive of all messages.
D) Has both a Web and Thick Client access - making it accessible to everyone.
With that said - Netflix could be doing a better job of giving people ETAs, and updates as to when service is, or is not, expected to be back up.
Transparency, in the face of adversity, is respected.
Even something as simple as "We're triaging, and will have an update in 60 minutes" would be sufficient.
I recently had to do a short scheduled downtime of my startup's site and cut the web server over to a "we'll be back soon" page with a simple embedded twitter stream widget on the page where I posted updates every few minutes.
I'm sure there are a lot of Netflix customers that fall somewhere between the range of not caring right now and the huge extreme you describe.
Not sure what your point here is.