Last week’s livestream of the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson didn’t exactly go as planned for Netflix and now the streamer is the one getting hit — with a lawsuit. A Florida resident has filed a lawsuit in Florida state court against the streamer on behalf of customers who ran into issues trying to watch the fight, claiming that Netflix was “woefully ill-prepared” for the massive global audience tuning in live, claiming that the streaming issues faced during the event constitutes a breach of contract on the part of Netflix as well as deceptive trade practices under Florida law.
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“Netflix customers experienced massive streaming issues and should have known better because it’s happened before,” the complaint reads in part.
The complaint continued, “Instead of providing the programming its viewers pay for every month, Netflix was completely unprepared and unable to fix the issues.” The complaint also noted that Netflix “continued billing for services not delivered” (via The Hollywood Reporter).
[RELATED: Mike Tyson Speaks Out After Jake Paul Loss, Addresses Health]
Taking place on Friday, November 17th, the long-awaited fight between Paul and Tyson was set to be a huge live event for Netflix and indeed, Netflix has since indicated that match drew an estimated average minute audience of 108 million making it the most-streamed global sporting event ever. However, during the event, users began reporting issues with the stream. Many took to social media to note constant buffering and the freeze streaming well before the main event actually took place. Issues persisted with some users going online with calls to “cancel Netflix” over the issue.
And as the lawsuit notes, this isn’t the first time that Netflix has had issues with a live streaming event. Back in April 2023, Netflix attempted their first major livestream event with the Love Is Blind reunion special. However, that event also did not go as planned due to technological issues. It was ultimately made available nearly 24 hours later on the platform after all of the errors and glitches, leaving fans with a taped event rather than the live event promised. After that fiasco, Netflix didn’t exactly explain what happened but seemed optimistic that future live broadcasts would not endure such issues. When it came to the Paul vs. Tyson fight, Netflix said ahead of the event that they were ready and that the streamer’s servers were up for the traffic.
That ended up not being the case for the Paul vs. Tyson fight. As for the fight itself, some fans powered through and were able to watch the main event which saw Paul defeat Tyson in eight rounds in a unanimous decision. As for the lawsuit, Netflix has not responded as of the time of this article’s writing.