Plex users report outage affecting media playback
Plex users said service problems were disrupting access to locally hosted movies and shows, with complaints appearing on Plex forums and Reddit.
By James Whitfield · Staff Writer
2 min read
Plex users reported widespread service trouble on July 14, saying the problems interfered with playback and server functions. The reports matter because many Plex customers use the service to organize and stream video files from their own home servers.
The Verge reported that complaints appeared on Plex’s own forums and on Reddit, where users described problems reaching Plex services and using features tied to their media libraries. The reports included frustration from people who said the outage was affecting access to content stored locally.
Plex is commonly used as a media server platform for people who host their own collections of movies and television shows. According to The Verge, users said the service issues were affecting that use case, even though the files themselves may be stored on personal hardware rather than on Plex’s servers.
One user on Plex’s forum wrote that “basically all Plex is down unless you can play locally over LAN and even that takes ages and doesn’t always work.” The same forum discussion included complaints about degraded local playback, The Verge reported.
Users also reported trouble with content matching, according to The Verge. Matching is the process Plex uses to identify media on a server and associate it with the correct title and metadata, such as artwork and episode information.
The Verge said its own access to the Plex TV website was slow during the incident, though the site began loading more consistently while its report was being written. That account matched user complaints that Plex’s web-connected services were unreliable during the outage.
Reports on Reddit also pointed to a service disruption, The Verge said. The complaints there were separate from the Plex forum thread but described similar problems with access and functionality.
No cause for the disruption was detailed in the available reporting. The extent of the outage, the number of affected users and the expected time for full recovery were not specified.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.