Netflix says 60 million households worldwide tuned in for Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match

NEW YORK – Netflix said that 60 million households worldwide had tuned in for the highly anticipated boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, and the Nov 15 event peaked at 65 million streams, according to a statement.

The bout between the 27-year-old social media influencer-turned-prize fighter Paul and the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion Tyson, which Paul won, was streamed live on Netflix.

Nearly 50 million households tuned in for the co-main event between Ireland’s lightweight champion Katie Taylor and Puerto Rico’s featherweight champion Amanda Serrano, added Netflix.

“The bout is likely to be the most-watched professional women’s sporting event in US history,” Netflix said in its Nov 16 statement about the fight, which Taylor won.

There were some hiccups during the live-stream of the bouts, with over 90,000 reports of problems, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.

However, the streaming platform was back up on Nov 16 after the outage that lasted roughly six hours in the United States.

There were also issues before the Tyson-Paul bout, with tens of thousands of Netflix users reporting that the service was not working for them, with many saying that the live-stream was failing to load.

The keyword #netflixcrash was trending on the social platform X in America as Downdetector received more than 500,000 reports that people were having problems streaming on Netflix.

Netflix declined to comment. The outage began around 8pm and lasted until just before 2am, according to Downdetector.

Frustrated viewers posted videos showing the frozen stream on their monitors. Some users even complained on X by thanking Netflix sarcastically for “bringing us back to the glorious days of dial-up internet”.

“Seriously? You didn’t make sure you wouldn’t have server issues?” one user named TheYounger posted in response to a post by Netflix advertising the fight.

Netflix has 283 million subscribers worldwide.

“We crashed the site,” Paul said in an interview after defeating Tyson, though the exact cause of the problem was not immediately known.

Dave Portnoy, founder of the Barstool Sports media network and a social media personality, said on X: “I’m in the classic torture chamber, where I can’t tell if my internet keeps going out or whether #Netflix is just constantly buffering and unwatchable for everybody.” REUTERS, NYTIMES