DirecTV Now, AT&T’s shiny new internet streaming service, has had a quietly good first year. The platform rebounded well from some launch problems late last year, and has been so successful in adding customers in the last year that it’s AT&T’s only beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak year for pay TV.
But either those bugs haven’t been entirely ironed out, or all that success is going to AT&T’s head, because the service appears to have been suffering some intermittent issues over the past couple days, making the experience a little unpleasant for users during the busy holiday TV-watching season.
Multichannel noticed a number of social media reports of outages, which appear to be corroborated by DirecTV Now’s official Twitter account. In replies to a number of complaints, the account has acknowledged an “outage,” and has said that technicians are working on a fix.
Per the social media reports, the outages have been brief and limited to a portion of users, rather than everyone. With streaming services, it’s difficult to pin down exactly what causes a problem: it could be a regional problem with a network, something device or app-specific, or caused by the users’ own internet (although that doesn’t seem to be the case here). But when you’re trying to replace cable, which is generally more reliable, customers expect cable-like performance.
AT&T declined to comment on what caused the outages.
