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:
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:
At some point, people began to wonder: Whose fault is this debacle?
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.
The biggest mistake was that they forced all homepage traffic to load the video. I don’t remember that ever happening for previous events. Even after 30 minutes of continued failure, they didn’t stop the homepage redirect. Definitely felt like another Apple Maps scale disaster.
As an owner of many, many apple products I really wanted to watch the livestream and get fired up about the new products. The livestream fail killed that enthusiasm, will absolutely delay my adoption of the 6+, and cause me to take a wait and see approach on the watch. It also added a bit more doubt in my mind that Cook can keep the magic alive at Apple. And it wasn’t just the train wreck spectacle of watching a global tech leader faceplant on the broadcast bunny slope. Not being able to watch on Chrome or via another stream provider is just sheer hubris. Sad day for Apple and its fans.
> As an owner of many, many apple products
So ultimately, after this livestream event is forgotten and you’ve read all the media, you’ll buy anyway. ;)
Ahh diddums get upset then and is woo not going to buy any more products. Grow up
omg *o*