Why does my Apple TV get stuck on accessing Netflixf

Try signing out of your iTunes account and then signing back in, as suggested by this Apple doc ->

Apple TV: Unable to access Movies, TV Shows, or other iTunes features after updating

Symptoms

After updating to Apple TV Software 5.2, attempting to use the following features may result in Apple TV unexpectedly returning to the main menu:

• Movies
• Music
• TV Shows
• Other iTunes Store features

ResolutionYou can resolve this issue by signing out of your iTunes Store account, and then signing back in:

1. Select Settings > iTunes Store
2. Select your account, and then select Sign Out
3. Select Add New Account
4. Sign in to your account

Verify that the issue is resolved by accessing Movies or TV Shows on your Apple TV.

If you encounter an issue signing in or out of your iTunes Store account, try restarting your Apple TV.

I just experienced this....

This worked for me: (wherever you are in the netflix-accessing process, you can do this) on the Apple tv remote, hold down the menu button and the down button together until the LED on the Apple TV box blinks rapidly. It quickly restarts Apple TV and I was able to access Netflix almost instantly. I didn't have to sign in or out of iTunes which saved a bunch of time too.

My AppleTV 2 and 3 was having issues accessing Netflix and after trying all the DNS fixes etc. without success I decided to go nuclear and figure out what was going on at a packet level. Here is what I discovered and hopefully it will help some of you who are experiencing the same issues.

When the AppleTV was communicating with Netflix, all the handshake and encryption setup worked flawlessly, the problem occurred when the AppleTV sent an Application Data packet to Netflix with a total packet size of 1514. Because the WAN interface on my router had a max MTU of 1460 for some reason, the packets were being dropped by the router and never making it to the Netflix servers. This happens because the SSL packets have the DONOTFRAGMENT bit set in the header. so when a packet larger than 1460 bytes hits the WAN interface as in the case of my 1540 byte AppleTV packet, the firewall says "Hey, I can't fragment this to my smaller MTU size, so in the trash it goes!" If the MTU on my internal firewall interface were set ath the 1460 and the larger packet came through, it would still be discarded, but the gateway would send a message back to the AppleTV using ICMP protocol (same protocol that PING uses) telling it to bring its packet size down to 1460 to match it. The AppleTV would then resend the data spread across two packets that fall below the max MTU of the gateway's interface. But because the WAN interface of the firewall has the lower MTU, and ICMP is filtered on my firewall, the ICMP message never makes it back to the AppleTV so the trusty little box just keeps trying to resend the same big packet over and over and over again.

The Fix that worked for me.

I simply set my firewall's WAN interface (pfsense) to automatically set MTU size. The second I applied the change Netflix on my AppleTV came up so quickly that it made my head spin!

If your firewall does not have an automatic setting for MTU then manually set it for 1500, which is pretty standard. If you still have an issue, set it up to 1518 which is the MAX that IPv4 allows without getting into special jumbo frames support (a special configuration on higher end switches)

Sorry to be long winded, but I hope this possibly helps someone out there.

This actually worked for me, it used to be a pain to even navigate through menus on Netflix and would just get stuck on accessing Netflix even when trying to load different genres, lists, or descriptions of movies or shows and I would have to back out and try again, sometimes multiple times, to get things screens to load. I've suffered with this for 2 years and you fixed it! Thanks a bunch! I had to manually change my MTU to 1500 and it worked. I think it was at 1462 or 1486 or something like that.