How did Netflix end up with massive delivery delays? "Because of massive database corruption in their Oracle cluster caused by a botched upgrade," according to a tipster. But don't blame Oracle (or Microsoft), necessarily. The tipster believes Netflix's own database adminstrators who bungled the upgrade. Why not just roll back the system?

I believe it's more complicated than that — probably transactions that happened *after* the upgrade that they now need to reconcile manually.

The theory would explain why Netflix seemed to know it received DVD returns from particular customers, but can't figure out what next from the queue to ship. (Photo by AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

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