Netflix is back, after an outage knocked many people offline for a few hours

People worldwide have reported trouble connecting to Netflix and a strange “tvq-pb-101” error message starting at around 5PM ET until the issue was resolved at around 8PM ET. Given the service’s global availability and massive subscriber base, small outages are common, but what we saw on Monday evening is different. Here at The Verge, among writers and editors scattered across the country, some of us could stream just fine, while others were getting the same error message and code other users have complained about.

Netflix’s status page failed to note the issues for a couple of hours before updating, and has now gone back to a green checkmark indicating the service should be working.

The “checking network connection” error message many Netflix users are seeing. Image: Amrita Khalid

Downdetector shows that reports of an outage started coming in at around 5PM ET, and we’d seen people discussing their problems streaming on X, Threads, Reddit, and other platforms. Reports of devices with problems include Roku smart TVs as well as many others, as well as people trying to stream via PS5 and Xbox, from cities scattered across the US and in different countries.

There weren’t any similar complaints about other services or noted issues on cloud services like Google or Amazon’s servers.

Netflix didn’t comment on anything specific behind the outage, although any issues getting to your TV shows and movies are getting even more frustrating as the prices for subscription streaming services continue to rise.

Update December 11th, 7:45PM ET: Noted response and status page update from Netflix regarding the ongoing outage.

Update December 11th, 8:17PM ET: Updated to reflect that the outage is over.