Why Hulu Might’ve Been Down During the Oscars

All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, StyleCaster may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.

If you were one of thousands of users who reported that Hulu was down during the Oscars, you may be wondering what happened to the streaming service, how to fix it and why it wasn’t working in the first place. The answer may be more simple than you think.

Why was Hulu down during the Oscars?

More than 34,000 users reported issues accessing Hulu after the 97th Academy Awards started at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on Sunday, March 2, according to the uptime monitoring site Downdetector.

Related Stories

Concentrated Haircare Is How You Actually Get Glossy Hair—Here Are the Best Products for Shiny Strands

This Nostalgic Millennial Boot Is a Cross-Generation Must-Have

Hulu Support confirmed the issues in a tweet on X at the time, telling users to try restarting your app or checking for updates” if the problems continue. “Having issues logging in? If so – we’re on it! Our team is actively investigating, and we hope to have things back up and running soon.” the tweet read.

According to tweets to Hulu Support, users faced two main issues with watching the Oscars on Hulu. Users on the desktop faced an HTTP Error 406 and received a page that read “This page isn’t working. If this problem continues, contact the site down.” App users, however, received a message telling them that the Oscars aren’t available to stream in their location.

“This isn’t available to watch in your location. Your Live TV coverage, including how it’s determined and what’s available (and when), may vary based on different factors,” the message read.

So why is Hulu down? Well, it’s not uncommon for streaming services to go down when airing live coverage. In 2023, Netflix attempted to stream the Season 4 reunion of Love Is Blind live, however, due to widespread outages, Netflix announced that it would film the episode and upload it for users to watch instead of streaming it live. (As many as 12,700 outages were reported, according to Downdetector.) “To everyone who stayed up late, woke up early, gave up their Sunday afternoon… we are incredibly sorry that the Love is Blind Live Reunion did not turn out as we had planned. We’re filming it now and we’ll have it on Netflix as soon as humanly possible. Again, thank you and sorry,” Netflix tweeted at the time. The service scrapped the live reunion for 2024.

Netflix’s co-CEO Greg Peters confirmed in a Q&A for investors after the Love Is Blind Season 4 reunion that the outages were due to a bug in the system that wasn’t apparent until millions of people tried to stream the episode live. “We had just a bug that we introduced, actually, when we implemented some changes to try and improve live streaming performance after the last live broadcast,” he said. “We just didn’t see this bug in internal testing because it only became apparent once we put multiple systems interacting with each other under the load of millions of people trying to watch Love Is Blind.”

While it’s unclear why Hulu was down, it’s possible that the service had the same bug while streaming the Oscars, which is seen by more than 10 million people each year. Though Hulu has its live TV service, Hulu+ With Live TV, the Oscars were available to stream on Hulu’s base plan, which may have posed issues similar to Netflix given that it’s one of the first events to stream live on Hulu’s non-live-TV service.

The Oscars stream on Hulu.