Netflix may have more paying subscribers than any other streaming platform out there, but even their servers didn’t seem immune to the mass consumer interest in the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight being broadcast tonight, Nov. 15, 2024. Mike Tyson may have sadly lost the widely watched fight (though he sustained eight rounds despite being more than 30 years older than Paul), but it was Netflix subscribers who seemed like the real losers due to reported problems with Netflix glitching, having lengthy loading times, or freezing entirely. This was even before Tyson and Paul stepped into the ring together, which was set to happen at 11pm ET but didn’t start until 12am ET; prior to that, Netflix aired other fights. For some people, they couldn’t even find the event on their home page, as this new Reddit thread shows:
Netflix has some basic explainers for addressing these issues, generally involving restarting the app or your internet service, but that wasn’t likely to fix this issue if their servers were simply overwhelmed by the amount of people trying to stream the anticipated fight between 27-year-old former Disney Channel star Jake Paul and 58-year-old boxing legend Mike Tyson. In the era of high-speed streaming, people have gotten used to immediate gratification, forgetting that 25 years ago we’d all have to hear the dial tone and wait for the little yellow man to run across the screen, as the post below illustrates:
It makes sense that people wanted to tune into this fight. Mike Tyson is one of the most famous boxers in the world, and he hasn’t had a professional match in nearly 20 years, since he lost to Kevin McBride in 2005. Meanwhile, Jake Paul only began boxing a few years ago and has gone 10-1, though he has mostly fought lower-tier boxers; nonetheless, he’s in the best shape of his life, and Tyson is possibly at the worst (in his professional career). Additionally, this has been hyped up for a while, with the drama exacerbated at every turn. The fight was supposed to happen back in July, but Tyson needed medical attention for an ulcer.
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The two were expected to unleash some real violence tonight, especially after the contentious weigh-in event yesterday when Mike Tyson slapped Jake Paul in the bearded face. Apparently, Paul was wearing shoes while Tyson wasn’t, and the former stepped on the latter’s toes. Tyson responded with a vicious slap across the face. “I was in my socks and he had on shoes,” Tyson told The New York Post moments after the weigh-in.
“He stepped on my toe because he is a f–king a–hole. I wanted to think it happened by accident. But now I think it may have happened on purpose,” Tyson added at the time. “I was in a lot of pain. I had to reciprocate.” Paul later responded on X with a mocking post, saying that the slap was a ‘wish come true’ kind of moment.
Nonetheless, after the fight, they each praised each other’s abilities, with Paul being especially ebullient in his praise of Tyson.
Netflix Outages Skyrocketed for the Tyson & Paul Fight
#MyNetflix and #Netflix began trending shortly after 8pm EST when the event began. @briiiitty writes, “If Jake Paul wins, don’t tell me, cuz my Netflix still buffering.” @DatNigC_FukWtMe adds, “My Netflix really stuck on stupid.” @DomNevaLow is another of many users reporting similar problems, writing, “My netflix keep freezing but my internet connection showing fast speeds. Netflix being overloaded.”
The trusty website Down Detector showed that the number of Netflix users reporting outages jumped from 1,358 at 8:15pm to 98,678 at 10:45pm, which surely just reflects a fraction of Netflix users experiencing similar issues. Who knows how high that number got when the Tyson and Paul fight actually began, around 12am ET? Well, you can always watch it on Netflix after the fact, and it shouldn’t glitch then. For anyone interested in Mike Tyson, we recommend the 2008 James Toback documentary, Tyson, which is narrated by the man himself. You can watch the Paul & Tyson fight through the link below: