Did you have trouble logging in to Hulu last night? If so, you were not alone.
Scores of thousands of subscribers to both Hulu’s live and subscription Video on Demand services last night logged complaints on social media sites that they could not login to their streaming plans.
(It’s unclear if the issue affected all subscribers, but this writer encountered the problem on his Hulu service and I could not find anyone on Twitter last night who said they were able to watch Hulu. DownDetector.com, which tracks online outages, noted dozens of thousands of complaints regarding Hulu’s service during primetime. )
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The problem seemed to begin sometime around 7 p.m. ET, according to the user posts, and continued until the early morning hours.
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“Refunds should be given out especially for live TV subscribers. Looking into YouTube live,” tweeted @Crazyabomb.
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“Trying to watch live games and can’t! Makes me miss Sling!” added @Brewjlb, referring to Sling TV, a live streaming rival to Hulu Live.
“This is nonsense. Someone needs to tell Hulu to fix this crap NOW. I’m not sure if the servers went bad or maybe they have a bad serial or RJ45 cable. Go to Fry’s or something and get this back up online. I’m going to develop an IpTV service for consumers and commercial applications. Probably have it up before this crap Hulu,” tweeted @disqus_uYHqBx2l7g.
Hulu’s Twitter customer service team, @HuluSupport, acknowledged the problem last night in a tweet at 8:19 p.m. ET.
“If you’re running into login trouble, don’t worry — Our developers are on the case! We apologize for the inconvenience and promise to get you back to your shows as swiftly as possible. We’ll update here once resolved. Thanks for bearing with us!” @HuluSupport wrote on Twitter.
An hour later, @HuluSupport tweeted again with this update:
“UPDATE: We have all hands on deck and our developers are working relentlessly to resolve the login issue as quickly as possible. Know that this is our top priority and we will continue to update you here accordingly.”
Some Hulu subscribers tweeted around 4 a.m. ET that they still could not login. But Hulu’s customer support team said the service was returning to normal shortly before 1 a.m. ET.
UPDATE: Thanks for bearing with us, our teams have been working hard to resolve tonight’s issues. ,” tweeted @HuluSupport. “Service is returning to normal levels and users have reported successful logins and streams.”
“Still just a screen of green here… (Well, green and the @hulu logo),” responded @dataandme at 4:22 a.m. ET.
The live streaming industry, which includes Hulu Live, Sling TV, DIRECTV Now and PlayStation Vue, has suffered recurring technical issues during the last few years. However, the subscription Video on Demand category, which includes Netflix, Hulu’s SVOD plan and Amazon Prime, usually is free from significant technical troubles.
But last night, both the live and SVOD streaming audiences got a taste of how delicate the online infrastructure can be.
“This wouldn’t be so bad (if) Hulu wasn’t my source of live TV…” tweeted @Crenn1e.
Hulu has not explained specifically what caused the issues, but did say it was having problems with its servers.
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Comcast and dishnetwork needs to merger dishnetwork 2018.so they both have same line ups and 4k channels…..
Friday, Jan 26, 2018, I cancelled Hulu Live. I keep getting messages that I am not watching at home, when I am. Spent 45 minutes on hold. 2 hours with a tech. Gave up in disgust. Keeping Hulu VOD for now. Trying DirectvNow.