When I was watching the behavior on the tv, was wondering if buffering sends some separate, non-business-as-usual requests, and that part of Netflix's delivery architecture was being overloaded.
E.g. "give me this previous chunk" vs "send me the current stream"
Buffering typically just consumes the same live stream until there's enough in the buffer. No difference other than the request rate being potentially higher. At least I can confidently say that for the standard players/video platforms. NetFlix could be doing something different. I'm not sure if they have their own protocols. But I'd be very surprised if the buffering used a completely different mechanism.
E.g. "give me this previous chunk" vs "send me the current stream"