If you are one of the nearly 17 million Netflix customers who suffered movie withdrawal after downed service this weekend, you can rest assured the popular online movie streaming service is back up and running.

According to several media reports, as well as Nextflix’s customer service account on Twitter, the service was down for several hours on Sunday night and came back online Monday morning.

“The website and watch instantly are online, but some are still having issues with activating devices,” the company said on its customer-service Twitter account at about 3:30 a.m. ET. “We’ll have that fixed ASAP too.”

A CNN report said that as of about 8:30 a.m. June 20, “some users reported still having trouble accessing the site, while others said it appeared to be working normally.”

Although Netflix has been tight-lipped on what exactly was caused the outage, several accounts say it was not the result of pillaging hackers.

“The good news is that Netflix wasn’t taken out by marauding hackers. Sony, Sega, and a number of other business and government sites have been hit by hackers in a high-profile spate of cyberattacks this spring, and some in the blogosphere speculated that Netflix may have succumbed to a similar attack,” a CNET report said June 20.

Netflix first acknowledged the problem on Twitter at about 12:30 a.m., writing “Hi everyone, we’re working hard to bring the website and watch instantly back up. We’ll post again when everything is back online.”

This is not the first time the popular movie streaming service has been out – TechZone360 reported an outage in October 2010, and went dark again in March 2011, leaving users without access to their queue or the ability to stream movies.

Netflix officials did not cite the cause of either outage – and is more than likely going to keep their lips sealed about the basis of this one, too.

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Erin Harrison is Executive Editor, Strategic Initiatives, for TMC, where she oversees the company's strategic editorial initiatives, including the launch of several new print and online initiatives. She plays an active role in the print publications and TechZone360, covering IP communications, information technology and other related topics. To read more of Erin's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell