Hulu customers are furious after the company's live TV service experienced an outage during the Democratic debate
- Hulu's live TV streaming service glitched on Wednesday night, interrupting viewers of the first Democratic debate of the 2020 election.
- Viewers took to Twitter to express their annoyance with Hulu.
- Hulu Support tweeted out a fix on Thursday and suggested "power-cycling" devices, modems, and routers - meaning turn them off, unplug them, and restart them.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Hulu viewers of the first democratic debate of the 2020 presidential election were interrupted by a streaming glitch on Wednesday night.
Hulu streamed the debate as part of its live TV service. According to Consumer Press, the interruption lasted for over one hour of the two-hour debate, getting resolved at its tail-end, around 10:40 p.m. ET. The Verge reported that alerts reading "error playing this video" and "playback failure" popped up during viewing.
Viewers took to Twitter to express their confusion with the interruption during the debate:
The displeasure continued Thursday morning, too:
Angry viewers warned the streaming service that errors during major live events would result in subscriber loss:
Hulu Support tweeted a solution on Thursday morning in response to one user's complaint that the same commercial was repeating on loop during the debate.
Hulu wrote that its developers "put a fix in place" and suggested users perform a "power-cycle" in order to "refresh your connection and start anew." A power-cycle entails turning off, and unplugging your streaming device, modem, and router before restarting.
Hulu did not respond to Business Insider for additional comment on the outage.
Hulu + Live TV, the platform's subscription service for live television, offers over 60 channels for $45 per month. YouTube's live streaming service, YouTube TV, is the same monthly price for over 70 channels.
Some viewers are contemplating a switch to YouTube TV in response to Hulu's streaming error, however, they may not need to: The debate was actually streamed for free on YouTube on Wednesday, and part two with the rest of the candidates on Thursday night will be streamed for free as well.