Netflix, the largest online video rental service in the United States, suffered a glitch on Monday morning, as their web site went down for several hours before it started working again. According to Steve Swasey, the company spokesman, the technical issue began around 7 a.m. PDT and lasted until afternoon.

Customers who tried to access the web site received the “web site is temporarily unavailable” message. Swasey said: “Our engineers have been feverishly working on repairing the problem all morning” and that “It was an unanticipated, unplanned outage, and we apologize to our customers,” CNET News reports.

Swasey said this is a very rare situation and such an outage hasn’t happened to the company in a very long time, but he avoided discussing the source of the problem. This situation will reflect, however, in the way customers get their shipments. According to Swasey, some of the customers who were supposed to receive their shipments on Monday won’t get them until Tuesday.

Netflix’s spokesman did say this hasn’t happened to the company in a long time, but by that he probably meant July 2007, when the outage lasted approximately 18 hours. The difference now is that, unlike in July last year, the company’s DVD shipments were affected this time, but the exact number of customers that will have to wait another day for their shipments was not made public.

What the company should be more concerned about at this time is the possible customer dissatisfaction. The technical glitch came as the number of Netflix customers rises every day and the share value is up again, after the downfall in July last year.

With an average of 1.6 million shipments a day, Netflix is the largest online video rental service in the United States and has over 7 million subscribers. The company was founded in 1997 and the web site was officially launched in April 1998.