Hulu Live Crashed During ‘This Is Us’ And People Were Not Having It

If there’s one thing you learn working in this business it’s this — do not mess with people’s deeply emotional family dramas. Thanks to a huge outage on the east coast last night, Hulu had to learn that the hard way while discovering that This Is Us fans take no prisoners.

Yesterday marked the premiere of “That’ll Be the Day,” an episode that seems to be as sad as this show typically is. However, This Is Us viewers aren’t idiots. They can do the math. They know that, counting this week’s episode, Season 2 only has has three episodes left and still no one knows how Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) died. At this point the series has become a high-pressured and tear-filled waiting game. Emotions were already high for all of these fans who have been subconsciously biting their nails in anticipation of a cliffhanger, so imagine the devastating fury that followed when they learned they couldn’t log into Hulu Live TV because of a technical error.

According to Down Detector and a blog called TV Answer Man, the log in problem seemed to start around 7 p.m. last night and persisted until the early hours of Wednesday morning. During that time subscribers were unable to log into their Hulu account and access any content. Over the course of four hours, Hulu’s support Twitter account sent out five tweets addressing the problem and adding updates to it.

As you may imagine, subscribers were less than thrilled about missing the episode and whatever sporting events they had planned to watch during this time:

But some subscribers were a bit nicer:

The above article speculated that most Hulu users were affected by this outage, but that’s not the case as this reporter personally spent most of last night crying over old Scrubs episodes on Hulu. Was I part of the problem? Possibly. Hopefully whatever giant flaw led to this mass outage has been permanently fixed. This morning send some kind thoughts to the stressed out This Is Us fans and the panicked and likely-sleep deprived Hulu crew. They need it.

Stream This Is Us on Hulu