Countless Apple fans overloaded the live stream from the company’s Apple Watch and iPhone 6 keynote Tuesday, leading to frequent outages: The stream switched to a test page, lost audio and stuttered, and the entire site even went down completely at times.
Things already were off to a bad start during the first thirty minutes before the beginning of the keynote, when the live music coming from the event location was mixed with random muzak, leading to some snippy remarks on Twitter:
one thing is for sure, #applelive hired the worst dj ever.
— Sascha Kösch (@Bleed) September 9, 2014
As the event started to unfold, with Tim Cook walking on stage, the stream switched to a test image:
And when the stream finally caught up with the event, users got to hear a Chinese simulcast translation for the first 30 minutes, leading to more jokes on Twitter:
You laugh now, but in the future all livestreams will be in Chinese. Apple ahead of the curve once again.
— Rick Klau (@rklau) September 9, 2014
At some point, people began to wonder: Whose fault is this debacle?
Maps team handling the apple webcast?
— Eric Elia (@ericelia) September 9, 2014
All joking aside, there will likely be lots of finger-pointing in the aftermath to this live stream. I have contacted both Apple, as well as the company’s CDN provider Akamai, and will update this post as soon as I hear back from them.
