Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson fight shows Netflix still struggles with live events

Viewers have been talking about Friday evening’s boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul — but probably not for the reasons Netflix was hoping.

Yes, the 27-year-old Paul (a YouTuber turned professional boxer) defeated the 58-year-old Tyson (a former heavyweight champion who came out of retirement for this match) in eight rounds, but the real headline was the glitchy experience for audiences watching live on Netflix, with freezing and buffering seemingly a common occurrence.

The #NetflixCrash hashtag was trending on X, Downdetector said it received over 1 million reports of Netflix issues in 50 countries, including 530,000 reports in the United States, with the issues peaking at around 11pm Eastern.

“This is the biggest event,” Paul declared after the match. “Over 120 million people on Netflix. We crashed the site.”

Netflix has stumbled with live programming before — last year, the broadcast of the Season 4 reunion of “Love is Blind” was delayed by more than an hour. Since then, the streamer has been ramping up its live lineup with exhibition golf and tennis matches, live talk shows, and awards ceremonies, without major issues.

While the streamer only releases selective data about its viewership, Netflix says 60 million households watched the fight live, with viewership peaking at around 65 million concurrent streams — so it’s probably safe to say that the Tyson/Paul match was the biggest test of Netflix’s live infrastructure to date.

The streamer now has a little over a month to make improvements before airing two NFL games on Christmas Day, followed by WWE Raw in January.

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