Lights, camera ... buffering? Why load testing is the real star of streaming services

The 2025 Oscars were meant to be a celebration of cinematic excellence, but for Hulu viewers, the biggest drama unfolded off-screen. As The Hollywood Reporter detailed, Hulu’s livestream of the Academy Awards suffered major outages, leaving frustrated users staring at frozen screens instead of red-carpet glamour. The Economic Times reported that viewers scrambled to find alternative ways to watch, turning what should have been a seamless experience into a PR nightmare for the streaming giant.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Streaming platforms, from Netflix to Hulu, have crumbled under high demand during major live events such as the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight back in November. And yet, these failures are entirely preventable — if companies prioritize performance testing, load simulation, and proactive scalability planning.

Breaking down the Hulu Oscars outage: What went wrong and why

During the 2025 Oscars on March 2, Hulu experienced significant technical issues that disrupted its first-ever live stream of the event. Starting around 6:30 p.m. ET, over 34,000 users reported problems such as being logged out unexpectedly and encountering blank screens. These issues, which appear to have been caused by backend infrastructure and content delivery network issues, persisted throughout the ceremony, causing many viewers to miss key moments, including major award announcements.

Despite Hulu Support acknowledging the problem and working on a fix, the interruptions led to widespread frustration, with users expressing their dissatisfaction on social media and considering alternative streaming options. This incident overshadowed Hulu’s debut in streaming the Oscars live, highlighting the challenges of managing high-traffic live events. Like the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight, the impact of a seemingly small issue — affecting just 0.14% of users — quickly spiraled into a major debacle, drawing widespread negative media attention.

The key takeaway: even if 99% of users have a flawless experience, the 1% who don’t, can be enough to make national headlines. In today’s digital age, users no longer tolerate service disruptions during high-profile events. But due to the complexity of modern, end-to-end delivery chains that often rely on integrations with external providers, the issues businesses face today are often more difficult to predict.

How to prevent streaming outages: Best practices for performance testing

Streaming platforms don’t have to leave their reliability to chance. By adopting a proactive and end-to-end approach to performance engineering, companies can ensure their systems are ready for high-demand events.

1. Set clear performance testing objectives

Without well-defined performance benchmarks, testing is ineffective.

Teams should establish:

• Expected peak concurrency (e.g., 5 million viewers) and test for 2x or 3x the load.
• Acceptable response times for critical actions like login, playback, and video quality adjustments.
• Clear success/failure criteria to determine whether the platform can handle the expected demand
• Benchmarks to understand how the use of CDNs and other external services impact performance

2. Test under realistic conditions

Real-world user behavior must be simulated in load tests.

This includes:

• Simulating concurrent logins at the start of a live event.
• Testing across devices and networks, accounting for different connection speeds and geographical distribution
• Measuring response times across external services to identify slow API responses, capacity constraints, and other potential bottlenecks
• Running large-scale stress tests to identify the system’s breaking point before it happens in production.

3. Use continuous monitoring and root cause analysis

Detecting and resolving performance issues in real time is critical.

This requires:

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to track server load, response times, and error rates.
• Real-time alerting to flag performance degradation before users notice.
• Detailed log analysis to pinpoint bottlenecks and optimize system performance.

4. Validate test environments regularly

A common mistake in performance testing is assuming that testing environments mirror production.

To prevent surprises:

• Ensure load testing environments are as close as possible to real-world conditions.
• Conduct frequent test environment audits to validate configurations, data sets, and integrations.

Winning with proactive performance testing

High-profile streaming failures don’t just frustrate users — they drive subscribers to competitors and generate negative press. The cost of not testing at scale far outweighs the investment in a comprehensive performance testing strategy.

Performance testing solutions like Tricentis NeoLoad can simulate millions of concurrent users and provide real-time analytics. By implementing these best practices, streaming services can ensure a seamless viewing experience — no matter how many people tune in.

Because when the cameras roll, the last thing users should see is a buffering icon.

To learn more about Tricentis NeoLoad and how to start testing today, take a look at our product tour.