Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match drew 60M households on Netflix
17 Nov 2024

The highly-anticipated boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, streamed live on Netflix, drew a global audience of 60 million households.

The event peaked at an impressive 65 million concurrent streams, the streaming giant said.

The face-off saw Paul, a 27-year-old social media influencer-turned-boxer, defeat Tyson, the former heavyweight champion who is now 58 years old.

Co-main event sets record for women's sports viewership
Record-breaking viewership

The co-main event of the night, headlined by Ireland's lightweight champion Katie Taylor and Puerto Rico's featherweight champion Amanda Serrano, also attracted a lot of attention with nearly 50 million households watching.

Netflix hinted that this match could be "the most watched professional women's sporting event in US history."

Technical glitches mar live-stream
Streaming issues

However, the live-stream of the boxing match on Netflix wasn't without its share of technical issues.

The streaming service suffered an outage that lasted for hours in the US, India, and other regions.

Outage tracking website Downdetector reported over one million Netflix problem reports from 50 countries. The US alone contributed to 530,000 of these reports.

The issues peaked around 11:00pm ET (9:30am IST, yesterday) and triggered the trending hashtag #NetflixCrash on social media platforms.

Paul declares boxing match as 'biggest event' on Netflix
Event significance

After the match, Paul said, "This is the biggest event. Over 120 million people on Netflix. We crashed the site."

Although Netflix has had hiccups with live programming in the past, the Paul-Tyson boxing match was probably the biggest test of its live infrastructure yet.

The streaming giant now has the task of enhancing its services before airing two NFL games on Christmas Day and WWE Raw in January.