Are you a Netflix subscriber? Have you noticed that you didn’t receive any DVDs from them within the last few days? If so, you may be part of the nearly one-third of customers that are affected by a massive technical glitch currently disrupting service in a number of their distribution centers. This has been going on since Tuesday, and as of today, they are still not back to full operating capacity.

Here’s the most recent update from the Netflix Community Blog on Thursday afternoon:

“By late this afternoon, we’d made enough progress on our system issues to begin shipping again from some of our distribution centers. We hope to bring the rest of our facilities back online overnight and be shipping from all of our distribution centers on Friday. But the issues we’ve faced over the last several days have been significant and there’s no guarantee at this point that our shipping operations will be fully restored by tomorrow. We’ll again be working throughout the night and will update you in the morning. Thanks for now and continued apologies.”

They have promised that any customer who experiences a delayed shipment will be issued a credit of some sort, but wow, that’s still gotta hurt. Larry Dignan at ZDNet says that they may be losing “roughly $1.8 million to $3.6 million in revenue a day”. So what the heck could have gone wrong to keep their system down for almost four days now? According to Valleywag, “a massive database corruption in their Oracle cluster caused by a botched upgrade”. Ouch… I guess there will be a few database administrators getting fired over this. Bottom line: computers are evil and the human race is doomed.