It was anticipated that the highly anticipated boxing battle between 58-year-old boxing great Mike Tyson and 27-year-old internet sensation Jake Paul would make headlines and attract a significant amount of Netflix viewership. Rather, a massive service failure that prevented thousands of fans from watching made the event noteworthy for a completely different reason.
What was beginning to be a historic moment for Netflix’s live sports streaming debut was overshadowed by technical issues, causing a major interruption on Friday night that prevented hundreds of customers from accessing the platform.
The outage started during the pre-main event undercard fights for Tyson-Paul, which took place at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. These concerns mostly focused on distorted audio, video pixelation, and buffering. Additionally, several customers experienced login problems and total service outages that continued long into the evening. A lesser but noteworthy number of users—roughly 1,200—also reported problems during the battle in India. Among the complaints were issues with Netflix’s website, app glitches, and video streaming issues.
At the height of the outage, about 14,000 reports had been submitted, according to Downdetector, an outage tracking service. Ten percent of customers had server connection issues, while the majority of complaints (86%) concerned problems with video streaming. Login issues affected the remaining 4% of users. In India, problems with video streaming accounted for 86% of reports, whilst app and website issues accounted for 10% and 8% of reports, respectively. However, Netflix reported that it is “not currently experiencing an interruption” in its streaming service, indicating that the issue has been resolved.
As is the norm with outages, frustrated users took to social media platforms (mainly X) in order to voice their grievances. The hashtags #NetflixCrash, #Unwatchable, and #NetflixFight quickly trended, with many expressing their disappointment at missing key moments of the fight, even sharing memes mocking Netflix’s technical failures, while others demanded refunds.
Regarding the Tyson-Paul bout, it was a much-awaited event that was expected to symbolize Netflix’s plans to diversify its services and enter the live sports market. The streaming service has recently started experimenting with live content, such as unscripted programs and reality television, after previously concentrating on on-demand films and TV episodes. But given that Netflix has revealed ambitions to stream more live sports, including NFL games and WWE events, Friday’s technical difficulties could make things more difficult.
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