Just how bad was Netflix’s boxing stream? Downdetector picked up 215 complaints per second at its worst
Netflix’s Tyson-Paul fight was plagued by technical issues.
Legendary but long-retired boxer Mike Tyson wasn’t the only party that was struggling to connect during his match with Jake Paul on Friday, as a bout of reported outages and periods of intense buffering plagued Netflix on its first big live fight night.
Though Netflix has boasted about knockout figures in the wake of “one of the saddest matchups in boxing history” — apparently 108 million viewers tuned in for at least a minute to see the 27-year-old influencer beat the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion — a lot of fight fans complained about the stream.
Data shared with Chartr by Downdetector, a monitoring service which analyzes “signals from its own websites, social media platforms and other sources,” reveals that over 1.1 million users around the world reported Netflix outages on the night of the fight and into the next morning, with 530,000 complaints in the US alone.
Put another way, roughly 1% of the headline audience was annoyed enough by the technical difficulties to go on the internet and explicitly complain it about it. At its worst, Downdetector picked up 193,000 complaints in a single 15-minute period, or 215 frustrations per second. On any normal day, 215 complaints might take a few hours to rack up.
With upcoming awards shows, Christmas Day sports fixtures, comedy specials, and wrestling broadcasts, Netflix has clearly bought big into live events recently, but one of its biggest tests so far wasn’t the knockout success it hoped for. Spending millions on live events will only work if they work. Luckily, the rest of the company’s business is booming.
