Hulu.com experienced a few outages today, all related to various updates we were making to our back end. Profiles and some video streams were impacted earlier this morning as we modified and replaced some key technologies; more recently, a network switch configuration change affected key site features, including profiles and video streams. Then again, perhaps it’s all related to our evil plot to destroy the world…
We’re back up and running, but if you notice any glitches, feel free to let us know on Twitter @hulu — as many of you already have — or by emailing our support team at .
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Hulu will be performing site maintenance from 12 a.m. PST Saturday until approximately 3 p.m. PST Saturday afternoon. While you will still be able to watch videos on Hulu.com during that time, many services will be unavailable, including access to your queue, subscriptions and account history; the ability to create new ratings, reviews and discussion forum posts; new account sign-up; and updates to your existing Hulu profile. Subscriptions to shows that are posted during this time will also be affected.
We apologize in advance for the inconvenience, and we’ll have the site fully functioning as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience.
The stuttering is evident on every streaming service. It is wise for Hulu to acknowledge that it is more of a technical issue and not with the person’s equipment.
Why is it that I can’t get videos added to Hulu after about Thursday of last week to play correctly? Older ones do just fine as they always have. The video portion of the newer ones stutters something fierce and bogs down my machine.
The stuttering is evident on every streaming service. It is wise for Hulu to acknowledge that it is more of a technical issue and not with the person’s equipment. The issue mostly happens when a camera pans across a scene. To me it may have to do more with the bit rate and compression than it does with anyone’s equipment. I have yet to find that download speeds or cpu power has any real effect on stuttering. If your video stops and needs to buffer than it is probably download speed or processor power.
I only feel that time and better technology will improve the stuttering issue. I have been watching online videos for a decade and each year it gets better. We are on the verge of receiving HD video in all it’s glory. We just need more time and these issues will work themselves out. I applaud Hulu’s efforts in making web video the place to consume content but for a while we may have to sacrifice quality for convenience an cost. One day things will be on par with dvd’s and cable but it may take a year or two.
As many of you saw, Hulu was pretty much wiped off the face of the Internet tonight from about 6:45pm – 7:45pm PST. During that period, all *.hulu.com would not resolve and emails sent to any @hulu.com email address bounced.
So what happened? Well there’s been some interesting theories about this that our users tweeted about during our outage including:
DanStasiewski: Hulu appears to be down. Should I get on the roof and wiggle the antenna?
JoeAnderson: Maybe bringing down Hulu.com will finally get me into the Evil League of Evil.
MattMusgrave: With Hulu down, productivity sky rockets.
benfortney: I think hulu said something bad about the chinese gov’t.
(and another one) benfortney: I blame the Republicans for taking out Hulu.
demosthe: Stale DNS cache maybe?
If you guessed #6, then you’d be correct. Around 6:45pm, we accidentally deployed an incorrect DNS record and this change was cached out to public DNS servers causing all *.hulu.com domains (including our email server, SVN depot, the whole kitchen sink) to resolve into the ether.
With the help of our guardian angel (thanks Phil!), we fixed the DNS change but then had to wait helplessly for it to fully propagate which took a bit of time, during which we kind of felt like this:
Our sincere apologies to all the users this outage affected and hope things are back to normal for you. If not, drop me a line and we’ll get you back up and running too.
There does still seem to be a problem with Hulu defaulting to the slowest streaming bitrates regardless of actual broadband speed. This was not a problem before the crash. Any ideas?
Seems that the service is horrible at the moment with its stuttering. Hopefully the DNS problems will get resolved. In the meantime… I’m going elsewhere.
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Gday individuals, only responding to this post for the reason that I fancy the subject point, and truly hope to search for like oriented many people to communicate to. I figure what better place then in the opinions of this blog, correct? Hehe. However if you would desire to chew the fat my name ismaria sexton and you can find me under that name on facebook .