Hulu experienced broad technical difficulties Thursday for more than two hours, as thousands of users spanning the U.S. logged complaints about problems with streaming video and accessing the Hulu app.
At about 10:45 p.m. ET, a rep for Disney Streaming Services, which operates Hulu, said in an email, “We have resolved the technical issue that temporarily impacted Hulu. We apologize for the inconvenience.” The spokesperson did not say whether customers would be eligible for refunds because of the outage.
User reports of issues with Hulu began to spike around 8 p.m. ET, according to monitoring site Downdetector — with more than 57,000 complaints registered as of 8:21 p.m. ET. The problems were reported across the country, with reports concentrated in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
According to user reports, the problems with Hulu were occurring on both the on-demand and live TV sides of the service across multiple devices.
A message on Hulu’s main support website said, “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!”
There were no evident issues Thursday evening with Disney+ or ESPN+, which are also operated and managed by Disney Streaming Services.
Meanwhile, the main page for hulu.com on Thursday displayed an error message to logged-in users that said, “We’ll be back. This page is temporarily unavailable. Please try refreshing the page or go back to the homepage.” Other attempts to access hulu.com returned an error message that said, “upstream request timeout.”
