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

People just do not appreciate how many gotchas can pop up doing anything live. Sure, Netflix might have a great CDN that works great for their canned content and I could see how they might have assumed that's the hardest part.

Live has changed over the years from large satellite dishes beaming to a geosat and back down to the broadcast center($$$$$), to microwave to a more local broadcast center($$$$), to running dedicated fiber long haul back to a broadcast center($$$), to having a kit with multiple cell providers pushing a signal back to a broadcast center($$), to having a direct internet connection to a server accepting a live http stream($).

I'd be curious to know what their live plan was and what their redundant plan was.

This is the whole point of chaos engineering that was invented at Netflix, which tests the resiliency of these systems.

I guess we now know the limits of what "at scale" is for Netflix's live-streaming solution. They shouldn't be failing at scale on a huge stage like this.

I look forward to reading the post mortem about this.

Everyone keeps mentioning at scale. I seriously doubt this was an "at scale" problem. I have strong suspicion this was a failure at the origination point being able to push a stable signal. That is not an "at scale" issue, but a hubris of we can do better/cheaper than broadcasting standard practices

As counterpoint, I observed 2-3 drops in bitrate, but an otherwise fine experience. So the problem seems to have been in dissemination, not at the origin.