Whoops: Lightbox suffers outage after major upgrade

Lightbox crashed last night, following its major upgrade yesterday.

The Spark-owned video streaming site was still offline for at least some users this morning, going by social media chatter.

Lightbox posted this morning to social media:

We completely understand how frustrating this outage is for our customers and have been working overnight to identify the cause. We hope to be up and running later today and will keep the updates coming. Thank you to our customers for your patience.

— Lightbox (@LightboxNZ) May 17, 2018

Yesterday's upgrade saw a replatforming from Xstream to Brightcove.

In the immediate term, the move was coupled with the addition of movies and kids' options to Lightbox.

But as Simon Moutter noted at Spark's annual result, Brightcove offers two World Cup-friendly capabilities: the ability to live stream events, and support for pay-per-view (he didn't include it, but Brightcove also lets an online broadcaster inject ads into live content).

Yesterday, Spark told NBR that although Brightcove has livestreaming capability for events, it has yet to be enabled.

The telco has yet to decide which platform to use for the September/October 2019 Rugby World Cup.

I won't throw stones at Spark, by any means. Glitches happen with big upgrades. It's a fact of tech life.

Still, the telco is under more heat than most.

It could reasonably expect in access of 1 million to try and livestream the World Cup final at once.

No pressure.

Spark's deal with World Rugby also included the World Cup Sevens in July, but the telco has bought itself time by giving full coverage to its free-to-air partner TVNZ, which will screen all games on its Duke channel and stream them via tvnz.co.nz.

UPDATE: Spark responds:

Lightbox implemented a platform technology upgrade yesterday morning. The upgrade overall went smoothly and throughout the afternoon and evening, the majority of Lightbox customers were able to log in to the new platform and access their favourite TV shows and movies. However, the new platform did experience a technical issue for a couple of hours yesterday evening. While the majority of viewers would not have noticed any impact, a number of people were unable to access Lightbox or experienced degraded quality when watching content.

The Lightbox team deployed a fix at around 11.30pm last night and are closely monitoring the performance of the platform. The Lightbox platform is running smoothly this morning.

We apologise for the frustration that Lightbox customers experienced who were keen to watch The Handmaid’s Tale last night.