Hulu service outage spike reported Thursday night

A website that tracks user reports of online service outages showed a large spike in reported Hulu disruptions that lasted nearly two hours.

Hulu users across the country reported disruptions in service Thursday night, largely along the East Coast. That was followed by users of AppleTV.

The website DownDetector.com, which tracks outage reports submitted by users, indicated a large spike in disruptions starting at about 7:55 p.m. ET. By 8:45 p.m., the number of reported issues passed 60,000. The reported outages declined after that and amounted to roughly 3,000 by 10:00 p.m.

Around the same time, there were reports on DownDetector.com of outages from users of Apple TV and AppleTV+, although not nearly as many as Hulu.

A heat map on the site indicated the largest number of Hulu outage reports were coming from Boston, New York, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, although there were indications of problems around the country.

A request for information sent to Hulu was not immediately returned.

Some of those reporting their outages on DownDetector threw some humor into their frustrations.

"How can we get Elon Musk to buy Hulu and fix it?" said one person, referencing the Tesla and SpaceX CEO who is making a bid to buy Twitter.

"Netflix losses thousands of customers and then Hulu goes down," said another. "Netflix is clearly behind this." It was a reference to the news from Netflix Tuesday that it lost 200,000 subscribers to start 2022 and expects to lose 2 million more before July.

"Russian cyber attack!!!" said another.

"Did the Kardashians crash it?" asked another.

The hashtag #HuluDown began trending.