Too Much TV Breaking News: Netflix's Rollout Of Its New UI Appears To Have Temporarily Broke Some Things

Netflix appears to have suffered a large outage on Thursday evening

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Thursday, May 29th 2025:

I had a much different newsletter planned for tonight, but pulled it in order to get this breaking news out.

THE UNFLAPPABLE STREAMING SERVICE HITS A ROAD BUMP
In a world where nearly every major streaming service has serious user experience problems they can't seem to fix, Netflix has long been the platform able to be consistently reliable. Sure, there have been some growing pains with its delivery of live streaming events. But those problems seem to have been resolved and even when a popular live stream was unavailable, the rest of Netflix still seemed rock steady.

That was not the case Thursday evening, when Netflix appeared to go down for a few minutes in North America, the UK and a number of other territories. I'm still trying to gauge the breadth of the outage, which seems to have been connected at least in part to the long-promised rollout of the new Netflix interface.

The outage was troublesome by itself, but when the service returned, it was missing a number of titles entirely. Programs such as Squid Game, Wednesday, North of North, Young Sheldon, John Mulaney Live and Dept Q. were either missing from the service or the episodes were shown without the ability for subscribers to watch the show.

The loss of Dept. Q was especially bad timing, given the series premiered on Thursday to solid reviews and many subscribers appear to have been in the middle of bingeing the episodes.

Subscribers who attempted to contact Netflix customer service reportedly faced long waits in the aftermath of the outage, but this is the response several people told me they received once there able to get through the backup:

"There have been reports from other customers experiencing the same thing. No worries though, our engineers are already aware and are investigating this issue to get back on track. We do not have details when it will be available but the good thing is there is nothing wrong with your account. In the meantime, we advise everyone to watch other shows temporarily and try that device at later time."

As of the time I write this, most of the shows seem to have been added back onto the service, with Dept Q and Mulaney Live being the latest to return.

I've reached out to several people at Netflix hoping to get an official comment. But I did speak to a Netflix engineer I know on background and even after the cause of the outage was explained to me. I'm not entirely sure I understand it.

But the missing titles apparently has to do with the tech stack for the new Netflix UI. For reasons that aren't clear (or at least, weren't shared with me), the database for the new UI either was missing some major titles or wasn't recognizing them for some reason. Which meant that a team had to go in and manually add the titles to the live service.

If you have any information on any of this, you can always reach out to me confidentially at rick@allyourscreens.com or on Signal at allyourscreens.24.

NOW EVERYTHING IS PART OF THE CULTURE WARS

WHAT'S NEW TONIGHT AND TOMORROW

THURSDAY, MAY 29TH:
And Just Like That.....Season Three Premiere (Max)
Bob's Burgers Season Premiere (Fox)
Death Valley Series Premiere (BritBox)
Dept. Q Series Premiere (Netflix)
Family Guy Season Premiere (Fox)
Grimsburg Season Premiere (Fox)
Jersey Shore Family Vacation Season Premiere (MTV)
Mad Unicorn (Netflix)
Scrublands Season Two Premiere (AMC+)
The Better Sister (Prime Video)
To Get Her (BET+)
The Great North Season Premiere (Fox)

FRIDAY, MAY 30TH:
A Widow's Game (Netflix)
Bono: Stories Of Surrender (Apple TV+)
Lost In Starlight (Netflix)
Lulu Is A Rhinoceros (Apple TV+)
Mama June: Family Crisis Season Seven Premiere (We TV)
The Heart Knows (Netflix)

SEE YOU ON FRIDAY!