A mysterious technical glitch has severely disrupted business at Netflix, with the video rental company still attempting to recover from an outage that left it unable to ship DVDs to millions of subscribers. The issue began on Tuesday and continues into Friday, with the company being able to get some of its distribution centers online and shipping out orders.

About a third of the company’s 8.4 million subscribers are still waiting for DVDs held up by the problems, and they have been promised free credit to compensate for the set back. This is truly a shame for a company that typically ranks high in customer satisfaction and has made some interesting announcements in recent months.

It’s not the first time Netflix suffers from such problems, though. A disruption back in July 2007 left the service down for 18 hours, while another issue in March of this year caused a one-day delay in delivering DVDs. For what it’s worth, this week’s outage does not affect the company’s streaming video service, which is offered for free to all subscribers.