Hulu’s Oscars Outage & the Challenges of Live Event Delivery
When Hulu’s livestream of the 2025 Oscars cut out, viewers were left with blank screens and error messages instead of one of the biggest nights in entertainment.
Issues first appeared around 7:15 PM (EST) during the March 2 event, and at 10:32 PM (EST) the stream ended prematurely just moments before the Best Picture announcement.
For IT teams responsible for live event delivery, guarding against disruptions like these is top priority. However, it’s easier said than done. Hulu is not alone—similar incidents can be found throughout recent history.
Last November, Netflix experienced a global disruption during the livestream of the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing event. In December 2023, Dazn viewers experienced audio problems during another boxing event, and TV images didn’t display for part of an English representative soccer match in April 2024.
What's behind all these disruptions? In Hulu's case, backend infrastructure issues appeared to be the core issue. In other cases, the network is to blame. The fundamental challenge is that the global Internet was built for broad connectivity, not necessarily to withstand sudden spikes in user demand. And with digital experiences now heavily reliant on third-party services, traditional playbooks of pre-event load testing and reactive troubleshooting are no longer enough.
Let’s examine what happened at Hulu and explore ways IT teams can reimagine their approach to delivering flawless digital experiences when the stakes are high.
Anatomy of a Fall(en Connection): What Went Wrong?
The Hulu Oscars outage unfolded in multiple stages, suggesting potential issues with the streaming infrastructure. While the company hasn’t disclosed the exact causes, the incident likely involved several factors common in high-traffic events.
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Access & Authentication Issues: Problems began around 7:15 PM (EST), with over 34,000 users reporting issues including login failures and playback errors. These disruptions can often result from high traffic, putting stress on authentication servers or triggering rate-limiting protections.
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Streaming Interruptions: Throughout the night, viewers experienced video quality drops and playback errors. These issues can be caused by factors such as congestion at the content delivery network (CDN), bottlenecks with Internet service providers (ISPs), or strain on the origin server during peak demand.
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Premature Stream Termination: At 10:32 PM (EST), the Oscars stream ended just before the final award announcement due to a scheduling error, removing the Oscars from Hulu’s live programming lineup.
The New Reality of Internet Delivery: It’s a Two-way System Full of Potholes
Beyond the Hulu outage, the broader challenge lies in the expectations placed on modern streaming, which still echo the simplicity of broadcast TV. Reaching millions of viewers was once as easy as transmitting a signal, but today’s digital experiences demand far more than just scale.
Today’s viewers aren’t just tuning in; they’re logging in, authenticating, adapting to different network conditions, and receiving content optimized for their device. This shift from one-to-many broadcasting to millions of individualized connections creates layers of complexity that broadcast infrastructure never had to contend with.
Unlike the direct path of a broadcast signal, streaming content must navigate an Internet full of unpredictable traffic patterns, bottlenecks, and detours—more like a sprawling highway system where obstacles can appear without warning:
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Congested Lanes: Network slowdowns and ISP bottlenecks
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Broken Bridges: BGP misroutes and CDN failures
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Misguided Detours: Security mechanisms blocking legitimate traffic
Most IT teams only see their own infrastructure, not the full “road system” of third-party services like CDNs and ISPs. This limited view is why the same failures keep happening—you can’t troubleshoot what you can’t see.
Assuring Performance When the Stakes Are High
For years, companies prepared for major digital events by stress-testing infrastructure under artificial load. But this approach no longer works when demand surges beyond what internal systems can simulate. The issues businesses face are often external and harder to predict:
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No One Owns the Full Stack Anymore: Services rely on third-party CDNs, cloud providers, authentication systems, and ISPs, each with its own unpredictable limits.
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Load Testing Doesn’t Simulate Real-world Internet Conditions: Internal tests may not account for CDN congestion, ISP failures, or BGP misroutes—which are often the real cause of outages.
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Security Tools Mistake Traffic Spikes for Attacks: DDoS protections and WAFs may block legitimate surges, thinking they’re bot-driven abuse.
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Auto-scaling Isn’t Instant: Cloud elasticity works eventually, but traffic can potentially surge faster than infrastructure can react—especially for databases and external APIs.
Instead of proactively validating performance, many companies rely on reactive scaling and troubleshooting, assuming that adding more servers will be enough. However, this approach is no longer sufficient in the face of modern infrastructure complexities.
5 Ways To Rewrite Your Script for Digital Resilience
To make sure high-traffic events go smoothly, IT teams must move beyond reactive fixes and adopt a proactive, end-to-end strategy. Digital resilience is built by anticipating challenges across the entire delivery chain and being able to adapt in real time.
Here’s how IT teams can direct a seamless experience, even under peak demand:
1. Strengthen Authentication Systems: Surges in login requests can overwhelm identity providers, triggering rate limits and access failures. Simulating authentication flows across regions, validating DNS resolution, and stress-testing login infrastructure help prevent disruptions before they reach users.
2. Prevent Security From Blocking Real Users: Firewalls, WAFs, and DDoS protections often misinterpret legitimate traffic spikes as malicious activity, blocking users at critical moments. Continuously monitoring security responses and fine-tuning rate-limiting policies help ensure protection without compromising accessibility.
3. Optimize Content Distribution: Streaming success depends on how well CDNs, ISPs, and cloud providers deliver content at scale. Benchmarking CDN performance, detecting anomalies, and planning for multi-CDN redundancy help ensure content reaches viewers smoothly, regardless of location.
4. Anticipate Network and Routing Disruptions: ISP congestion, BGP misroutes, and backbone failures introduce unexpected slowdowns that degrade experiences. Detecting BGP anomalies, tracking network latency, and assessing ISP performance provide early warnings of external disruptions before they impact viewers.
5. Eliminate Cloud Scaling Bottlenecks: Cloud auto-scaling isn’t always instant, and slow API responses can create hidden choke points. Measuring response times across third-party services, identifying capacity constraints, and stress-testing scalability help ensure that infrastructure can expand in sync with demand.
These strategies can help IT teams respond faster and reduce downtime. With visibility across the entire digital supply chain, organizations can move beyond reactive troubleshooting to help maintain reliable performance even under extreme demand.
How To Prepare for Your “Oscars Moment”
While your IT team might not be responsible for streaming the film industry’s largest award show, every industry has its “Oscars moment”— a high-stakes, high-traffic event where failure isn’t an option.
Whether it’s a big sporting event, a Black Friday sale, or a major product launch, your infrastructure will face moments of extreme pressure. The question isn’t if something will happen, it’s whether your team will have the visibility to curb it before customers, executives, and news outlets take notice.
This means having a full view of your entire delivery chain—to anticipate risks, see external dependencies in real time, and pinpoint the exact source of an issue before it impacts users—transforming digital performance from a business risk into a competitive advantage.
Because when there are no second takes, every second matters.