People have been talking about Friday night's fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, but probably not for the reasons that had Netflix with high hopes.

Indeed, 27-year-old Paul, a YouTuber turned professional boxer, took eight rounds to beat 58-year-old Tyson, a former heavyweight champion who had come out of retirement for the match. The real headline, however, was the glitchy experience audiences experienced live on Netflix, with freezing and buffering seemingly occurring most often.

Downdetector said the #NetflixCrash hashtag was trending on X and it received more than 1 million reports of Netflix issues in 50 countries, including 530,000 reports in the United States, with issues peaking around 11 p.m. EST.
"This is the biggest event," Paul declared after the match. "Over 120 million people on Netflix. We crashed the site."

The streamer has made mistakes with live programming in the past — last year, the Season 4 reunion of "Love is Blind" was on for more than an hour late. Since then, the streamer has been building up its lineup of live content: exhibition golf and tennis matches, live talk shows, and awards ceremonies, without significant problems.

While Netflix only releases selective data about its viewership, for its part it says that 60 million households watched the fight live, peaking at 65 million concurrent streams so probably safe to say that the Tyson/Paul match was the biggest test of Netflix's live infrastructure to date.

He now has less than a month to get his house in order before broadcasting two NFL games on Christmas Day, followed by WWE Raw in January.