Disney+ crashed on launch day because its software wasn’t ready for the demand
0Reported today on The Verge
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Reported today in The Verge.
Disney+ crashed on launch day because its software wasn't ready for the demand
On Disney+'s first day, its initial 10 million subscribers were hit with a series of outages. The company says this was because of high demand and the way engineers "architected the app."
Ahead of the launch, Disney executives thought they would be ok. Michael Paull, head of Disney Streaming Services, told The Verge in August that years of handling big streams (like Game of Thrones premieres and finales) prepared the team for a launch of this size. It didn't.
New subscribers couldn't log in to the app; if they managed to get in, streaming was nearly impossible. People thought it might be issues with Amazon or third-party platforms carrying the app, but Kevin Mayer, head of Disney's direct to consumer division, denied those rumors.
"It had we to do with the way we architected the app," Mayer said. "It was not Amazon."
Disney+ runs on BAMTech technology - the same streaming service that saved Game of Thrones fans from dealing with HBO Go streaming problems when HBO Now launched. BAMTech also used to host MLB's digital services, and proved throughout the years to be reliable. Mayer argued that although BAMTech has dealt with high volume streams in the past, that group had never seen the traffic that Disney+'s launch day brought in.
"We've never had demand like we saw that day and what we're continuing to see," Mayer said. "There were some limits to the architecture that we had in place were made apparent to us that weren't before."
Subsequent problems, including glitches within the app affecting where a movie picks off when people click "continue watching," are also being fixed. "It's a coding issue," according to Mayer, "and we are gonna recode it." Client updat