Generally Netflix outages occur during the evening, when people are home from work and enjoying a film or TV show. However, this afternoon the service is inexplicably down for users trying to stream content, and has been for at least a half hour or so according to frustrated users that are discussing the outage on Twitter.
No word yet on the cause for the downtime; at the moment (2:20 p.m. ET) Netflix is either not loading or rendering a message “Site Error -- We were unable to process your request.” The outage appears to be both on the Web and on the many settop boxes and consoles that now stream Netflix.
Update (2:27 p.m. ET): Netflix acknowledges an issue on their site, writing, "We’re sorry, the Netflix website and the ability to instantly watch movies are both temporarily unavailable."
Update (5:10 p.m. ET): Netflix has tweeted that, "We're aware of the issues that are occurring and are working diligently to get everything up and running again. Thanks for your patience!"