Netflix served the Tyson vs. Paul fight to 60 million households

Netflix peaked at “65 million concurrent streams” during the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul last night, according to Most Valuable Promotions, the promoter for the fight. Those streams went out to 60 million households globally, the group said in a press release shared with The Verge via email. That’s more than twice the traffic Netflix could see for its Christmas Day NFL stream this year, if everyone who watched last year streamed it.

The crush of people trying to watch Tyson vs. Paul seemed to be more than Netflix’s servers could easily handle, as the social web was awash with complaints about the quality of the stream, which many found to be muddy, or plagued with buffering and dropped connections. Downdetector recorded more than 100,000 complaints of Netflix streaming issues during the event, according to Bloomberg.

That’s also just a massive number of people streaming a single live event at the same time. Disney served 59 million concurrent streams of a World Cup cricket match through its Disney Plus Hotstar service last year. It hit similar numbers a few days earlier, and again in June this year.

Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone told employees that the company dealt with this “unprecedented scale” by prioritizing keeping the stream stable “for the majority of viewers,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

“We don’t want to dismiss the poor experience of some members, and know we have room for improvement, but still consider this event a huge success,” Stone reportedly wrote.

Update November 16th: Added Disney Plus Hotstar streaming numbers for additional context.