If you are looking forward to rest and chill with Hulu after a tiring day from work, the bad news is that the streaming platform is down because it is currently facing broad technical difficulties for its users in the U.S.
Hulu appUnsplash/ Tech Daily
It's not you, It's Hulu
Subscribers of the service raised the outage online, and according to a real-time problem and outage monitoring site called Downdetector, the reports spiked around 8 p.m. Et with more than 61,000 reports recorded as of writing.
Most of the reports are concentrated in places such as New York, Boston, Atlanta, D.C., Washington, Alabama, Montana, Chicago, Texas, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and many other states.
66% of the reported problems were about Hulu's video streaming, 24% are about the app, and 11% were for the website.
Reports of subscribers also indicate that the issues with Hulu were happening on both the on-demand and live TV sides of the platform across multiple devices.
"Playback unavailable? We're investigating the issue with the highest priority and hope to have things back up and running soon. Thanks for your patience!," Hulu said on their main support website.
In a statement with Variety, a representative for the Disney Streaming Services, which operates Hulu, said that "We are aware of a technical issue impacting Hulu. We are working to resolve it quickly."
However, the Disney rep did not give any estimated time of arrival for the streaming platform to be up and running and whether their subscribers can avail for refunds due to the outage.
The hashtag #HuluDown is in the third spot on Twitter trends, with almost 8,000 tweets published.
Meanwhile, the official Hulu Support Twitter page did not tweet or acknowledge the outage despite users going to the bird app to report the problem. Their Twitter page, as a matter of fact, has not been updated since August 9, 2021.
One Twitter user writes, "Even more frustrating than @hulu being down is their complete lack of any official acknowledgment or status after 2+ hours. What's the point of @hulu_support? What type of customer service is this? #HuluDown."
"How is Hulu just gonna crash like that? I just cut cable about a month ago. Took me forever to do that and decide which 'live' streaming service to go with. One month in, and it crashes completely. Do Better Hulu. #HuluDown," tweeted by another user.
Subscribers also flooded the comment sections of every top and unrelated post on Hulu's official Facebook page to complain about the outage. Majority of the users were complaining that the NBA playoffs is currently on and that the platform is too expensive to have these kinds of issues.
Last year in October, Disney increased the price for Hulu's VOD streaming packages by one dollar for every current and new subscriber. While Hulu with ads went up from $5.99 to $6.99 per month.
If the user wants the service to be ad-free, they have to pay $12.99 per month which is one percent increase from last year as well.
For Hulu's live TV, they also increased the price for Live TV plans by 5$ monthly. In total, the live service costs $69.99 per month with ads in the subscription and $75.99/month for no ads.
