Netflix drops video quality in Australia, India, and Latin America amid coronavirus crisis

The coronavirus outbreak has taken the world by storm and as countries are scrambling to contain the virus, tech companies have another battle at their hands. Due to the nature of the virus, companies have asked their employees to work from home which has skyrocketed the use of the internet around the world. To ensure that the infrastructure remains intact under the enormous load, companies have been reducing their video quality to release some bandwidth.

After reducing the video quality in Europe, Netflix is now dropping the video quality in Australia, India and some Latin American countries. According to a person familiar with the matter, Netflix is taking the aforementioned steps case-by-case after consulting with regulators and other government bodies. Unlike YouTube, it’s possible that the company won’t reduce the bit rate in all the countries.

Netflix was a victim of an outage on Wednesday but it’s not clear if the issue was related to people logging onto the service at the same time. The company is yet to break its silence on the matter but for now, users in Australia, India and some Latin American countries won’t be able to stream Netflix in 4K.