Some of Netflix’s 283 million global subscribers might miss out on the live call of the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul boxing match Friday—and if they do, it’ll be a high-profile failure for Netflix just one month before its first Christmas Day NFL doubleheader.
With less than an hour to go before the heavyweight match expected to start around 11 p.m. ET, there are widespread reports of problems with Neflix’s stream on Friday night.
Outage reports from Netflix users on the website Downdetector began at 8:12 p.m. ET and spiked near 99,494 reports at 10:45 p.m.
Sports fans and TV commentators took to social media to share photos of their Netflix screens crashing and buffering and crack jokes.
ESPN’s Jay Williams tweeted, “My @netflix has crashed … & all I want is to watch this fight.”
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy tweeted, “I cant tell if my internet keeps going out or whether #netflix is just constantly buffering and unwatchable for everybody.”
FS1’s Emmanuel Acho tweeted, “Netflix is finding out in real time how hard it is to produce live TV. They need to get these Mic issues fixed before the NFL broadcast’s on Christmas.”
Jerry Jones, the proud Dallas Cowboys owner hosting the fight at his AT&T Stadium, was left uncharacteristically speechless when his mic went out during the prefight studio show. Former Super Bowl champ Michal Irvin had to helpfully hand his old boss his live mic.
While Netflix Struggled, X Took Advantage
At midnight as Paul and Tyson finally entered the ring, 3.1 million people were watching a livestream of the fight on X/Twitter, and Elon Musk happily retweeted a user who said, “Props to @elonmusk for having the @jakepaul & @MikeTyson fight stream working on @X for more than a million people while @netflix is dropping the ball.”
Another 5.5 million people were watching a stream of the fight on X/Twitter from former NFL player Antonio Brown, who broadcast from his phone pointed at the jumbotron inside AT&T Stadium, until the stream went out at 12:16 a.m. ET.
Netflix declined to comment on the issues when reached by Front Office Sports on Friday night.
