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Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

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492 points storf45 | 4 comments | 16 Nov 24 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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freditup ◴[16 Nov 24 03:57 UTC] No.42154036[source]▶
I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically.

This sure doesn't help with that impression, and it hasn't just been a momentary glitch but hours of instability. And the Netflix status page saying "Netflix is up! We are not currently experiencing an interruption to our streaming service." doesn't help either...

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rvz ◴[16 Nov 24 04:17 UTC] No.42154144[source]▶
I don't think Netflix is even designed to handle very extreme multi-region live-streaming at scale as evidenced in this event with hundreds of millions simultaneously watching.

YouTube, Twitch, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc have all demonstrated to stream simultaneously to hundreds of millions live without any issues. This was Netflix's chance to do this and they have largely failed at this.

There are no excuses or juniors to blame this time. Quite the inexperience from the 'senior' engineers at Netflix not being able to handle the scale of live-streaming which they may lose contracts for this given the downtime across the world over this high impact event.

Very embarrassing for a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company.

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gonzo41 ◴[16 Nov 24 04:25 UTC] No.42154200[source]▶
They must have try to do this on the cheap, thinking they could dynamically scale on the fly for this. Big mistake.
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anakaine ◴[16 Nov 24 04:29 UTC] No.42154236[source]▶
This is a total supposition without any proof.
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colesantiago ◴[16 Nov 24 06:03 UTC] No.42154709[source]▶
What more proof do you need other than the fact that streams went down worldwide on a highly anticipated event from a public company?

I wouldn't be surprised if lots of engineers at Netflix are currently now writing up a length post mortem of this.

And this is from the company that created the discipline of chaos engineering for resilience.

It is clear they under invested and took the eye of the ball with this.

This is bad, like very very bad.

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1. jhugo ◴[16 Nov 24 07:38 UTC] No.42155091{3}[source]▶
The assumption that it was related to insufficient investment isn’t supported by any evidence. Flawed technical decisions can be made by the most expensive engineers too.
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2. colesantiago ◴[16 Nov 24 16:45 UTC] No.42157316[source]▶
The evidence is that the stream went down.

We will see why it went down and to what extent they underinvested in their post mortem.

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3. jhugo ◴[17 Nov 24 08:49 UTC] No.42162896[source]▶
That’s not evidence for the assertion you made.
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4. colesantiago ◴[17 Nov 24 20:13 UTC] No.42166780{3}[source]▶
Other potential and future entertainment partners Netflix will be working with e.g. WWE, will certainly see my view as they will be questioning Netflix's capability after that major streaming issue we both saw.

This isn't Netflix's first time they had this live streaming problem.

People will see this as an underinvestment from Netflix's part and they will reconsider going to a different streaming partner.