Disney's Hotstar suffers outage in an apparent domain renewal mess

Disney+ Hotstar is suffering an outage for some users in India in the middle of a popular cricket match, drawing flak from customers at a time when the Disney crown jewel is already facing several setbacks in the South Asian market.

It's unclear what prompted the glitch, which Hotstar acknowledged as "unforeseen technical issues" across its apps and web. Domain registrar records show that Hotstar renewed the domain name, Hotstar.com, on February 17. If Disney had briefly lost the ownership of the domain, it would take some time for the new change to reflect to all users.

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DownDetector, a web reliability monitoring service, reported a sudden spike in the volume of complaints surrounding Hotstar on Friday. Scores of users on social media also noted that they were unable to consume the app on their phone and desktop.

A Hotstar spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The outage comes amid the ongoing high-profile cricket tournament between India and Australia. Hotstar, one of the most popular video streaming services in India, recently lost the streaming rights to the popular IPL cricket tournament in what analysts say could topple its customer base in the country.