Netflix went down for users in several countries with TV screens displaying an error message.
Frustrated viewers in the UK, the US, France, Ireland, Spain and several other countries filled social media with posts explaining how they were unable to watch programmes such as Squid Game.
A photo shared with the Mirror showed a message stating: “Netflix has encountered an error. Retrying in 14 seconds.”
It then displayed an error code and gave viewers three buttons to click on: "Try again", "More details" and "Exit".
The Netflix outage added to what's already been a miserable week for internet users, who've had to deal with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and WhatsApp all going down in recent days.
Almost 3,000 Netflix users in Britain logged reports of the outage on the website Downdetector just before 11.50pm on Thursday.
A viewer in Berlin wrote on Twitter: "Ok, so #netflixdown. Thank goodness finished #SquidGame earlier today."
A woman in Scotland tweeted: "Netflix going down mid-episode… is this what I get for laughing when it was Facebook?"
And a third user wrote: "Got to a really good part on squid game and Netflix has gone down... ffs."
Amid thousands of customer complaints of disruption, Netflix's help centre website, however, did not report any technical problems.
It stated: "Netflix is up! We are not currently experiencing an interruption to our streaming service."
Earlier this week, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced a seven-hour outage that sparked frustration and fury among users.
That outage was caused by an error during a routine maintenance job, the company has said.
Billions of the platforms’ users had been left unable to get online on Monday by the fault, which the company said was “an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making”.
As well as sparking debate about the public use of social media, the outage also saw EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager repeat calls for greater competition in the tech sector – saying the incident highlighted the negative impact of big tech firms controlling large swathes of the online world.
“We need alternatives and choices in the tech market, and must not rely on a few big players, whoever they are,” she wrote on Twitter.
