Sling TV last night suffered a significant technical failure, causing thousands of people to complain on social media sites that they could not watch the season eight premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead.
At 12:25 this morning, well after the episode was over, Sling tried to smooth ruffled feathers with a bit of humor.
“The Zombies got the best of us tonight,” wrote @SlingAnswers, the streamer’s Twitter customer service page, in reference to the lifeless monsters who hunt down The Walking Dead’s characters.
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Sling yesterday held a day-long free preview, in part to promote the season debut of the highly-popular zombie apocalypse show. But the free view apparently attracted so many Walking Dead fans that it caused Sling’s entire technical infrastructure to buckle.
Shortly before the 9 p.m. ET start time for the premiere, Sling users began posting angry messages on Twitter and other social media sites that they suddenly received on-screen messages saying the Sling app was “not available.”
“Trying to watch the Walking Dead and Sling TV is FUQING it up!” tweeted “Chunkyness” at 8:53 p.m. ET.
“HEY SLING TV, YOUR SERVICE JUST WENT DOWN RIGHT BEFORE THE START OF THE WALKING DEAD. TRYING TO WATCH IT AND I CANT. FIX SERVERS,” wrote “TheMadKing.”
At the height of the issue, DownDetector.com, which tracks online outages, said 1,260 different Sling users were complaining on social media. They said they could not watch Sling on any platform, including phone, Net TV device or tablet.
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The technical problems arguably hit The Walking Dead fans hardest, but viewers of other shows also posted complaints.
@SlingAnswers, the streamer’s Twitter customer service page, acknowledged the issue in several tweets during the 9 p.m. hour.
“We are experiencing streaming issues. We are working to fix this issue as soon as possible,” Sling tweeted.
Many users said service began to return shortly after The Walking Dead episode was over, which was no solace to TWD fans.
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“Going to be honest. There seems to have been lots of glitches lately. Our family is considering making a move to something else if not fixed,” responded “Bryant Laird.”
While DIRECTV Now, one of Sling’s main live streaming rivals, did not appear to have any serious technical issues last night, it did suffer two different technical meltdowns over the weekend.
On Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, DIRECTV Now was hit with thousands of complaints from users saying they could not log in, or if they could, the picture would not display.
“WTF? I got logged out and can’t log back in. I get a message that says timeout. I hope this is fixed before the Walking Dead season premier!!” wrote “Melissa.”
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As a tech industry veteran (over 25 years), taking into account the technology currently available (i.e. load balancers, containers, auto-spawning, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.), I’m kind of baffled why these streaming services are having all these issues. If you engage content delivery vendors that are “talkers” instead of “doers” to handle your stream hosting/delivery, then that’s on you (SlingTV, Direct TV Now, etc.).
Bottom line, if you “squeeze the nickel” to save money instead of paying industry-tested-reliable delivery vendors, then you are using crap and you will deliver crap. Yes, bottlenecks can be caused by “hops” and poor “final mile” distribution (i.e. Cable providers) but, that’s why you pay for alternate distribution channels that your “load balancer” can manage and engage automatically when traffic increases. So, we have the capacity, we have the technology and we know that the good sauce costs money. Why are we tolerating this BS?
Sadly this is nothing unique to last night. It happens MOST weekends….football games cut off, supercross cuts out…..nothing works….and they just laugh and say “our bad”…..i cut the cord and am ready to cut sling
How does DirecTV now work with AT&T’s Primitive “U-Verse” ?
You can’t Stuff HDTV, High Speed Internet, & Phone on (1) Old Pair of Copper Wire.
Are they using the Cable Networks (COAX) to provide the streaming service ?
Why do you think AT&T Bought DirecTV. They Finally admitted U-Verse is a Failure.
Also, When is AT&T Going to RE-NAME “DirecTV now something that is NOT so confusing ?
When ever you hear DirecTV now, you wonder, are they talking about Satellite DirecTV doing something [now], or the new internet service.
I was thinking about getting Sling but now I guess I wont
I pay for Sling and had absolutely no problem watching TWD premiere last night.
Likewise here in the west (Oregon), we had no SLing problems this weekend…or ever.