Last night DIRECTV NOW went down at about 9 pm Eastern according to reports for our readers and some subscribers are still reporting the service as down this morning. At this time AT&T customer support reps are telling subscribers they are working on the issue and hope to have it back online shortly.
Update: Cord Cutters News talked with an AT&T rep who said the service is being restored to affected customers but they may need to restart the DIRECTV NOW app if they still have it running.
This outage comes after a weekend that saw many live TV streaming go down including services like WatchESPN, DIRECTV NOW, and PlayStation Vue to name a few. So far none of the major streaming companies have come out with a statement on what is happening.
So what happened with all the recent outages?
As best we can tell over the weekend what has happened is a rush of new subscribers and unexpected demand in viewership has left streaming services struggling to keep up. This is not just from cord cutters but also cable subscribers wanting streaming access to their shows as seen with WatchESPN.
Now streaming services are rushing to expand compacity to handle the demand. Why is it so slow in the day and age of on-demand hosting? Security is a big part of it. The contracts streaming companies have with the content providers don’t allow them to just put the content on any old server. These servers must be secure with a secure connection to prevent pirate streams coming from them.
So why this outage? Well at this time we are unsure it is very possible that it was a physical hardware failure or an effort to update the system crashed DIRECTV NOW.
We have reached out to AT&T and will update this post if we learn more.
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