In what was supposed to be a monumental moment for Netflix in live sports streaming, the much-hyped boxing match featuring Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson turned into a disaster on Friday night. The event, which promised a boxing fight for the ages, instead delivered widespread frustration as technical glitches brought the streaming platform to its knees.
According to Downdetector, over 1 million users across 50 countries reported service disruptions, with 530,000 reports in the US alone. The problems peaked around 11 p.m. ET (7 a.m. local time), coinciding with the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson livestream.
Jake Paul, the 27-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer, emerged victorious in an eight-round unanimous decision against the 58-year-old boxing legend Mike Tyson. However, the fight’s outcome was overshadowed by viewers’ nightmarish streaming experience.
Subscribers flooded social media with complaints, dubbing the broadcast a “circle of infinite buffering.” Technical issues weren’t limited to the stream itself, as even the broadcast production suffered with malfunctioning equipment disrupting interviews and commentary.
Netflix claimed 60 million households watched the fight, with viewership peaking at 65 million concurrent streams. Jake Paul also went ahead to declare, “We crashed the site,” though the exact cause of the outage remains unclear.
This livestream event was perhaps Netflix’s most significant test of live streaming infrastructure to date. With upcoming live events like NFL games and WWE Raw on the horizon, the company has little time to address these major technical shortcomings.
Interestingly, Netflix has already announced another high-profile event: Beyonce will headline the halftime show for the Texans-Ravens NFL matchup on Christmas Day, which will be streamed live.
As for the fight itself, Paul dominated Tyson in a match that ultimately failed to live up to its pre-fight hype, with judges scoring decisively in Paul’s favor. While no official sources have disclosed the fight’s purse, reports claim that Jake Paul walked away with $40 million while Tyson took home about $20 million.
