Welcome to Plex's home for real-time and historical data on system performance.
There's apparently a Plex outage currently. And it's a bit frustrating as it's preventing our TV app from connecting. Just an endless spinner after choosing a user despite only using local media etc.
Dang, I should have posted this 10 minutes ago as it's back online now. Still, a little frustrating that what I thought was 99% local apparently has a pretty critical 1% on services someone else controls.
A Plex client connects to a Plex server through the central Plex service. That way you don't have to mess with your router and you can invite anyone in the Plex system easily to your own server. The drawback is that you will have issues when the central service is unreachable.
I guess I'd hoped it was less frequently than every time a user logs in. Or that the metadata was locally cached and checked occasionally. Or that there'd be a fallback for cases like this when outages occur. It's a nice feature for sure, but not having a local fallback (even a complicated one for most users) is a bummer.