Millions of cricket fans encountered an abrupt stoppage of their live streaming of Day 1 of the second Test between India and Australia after Hotstar stopped working. While those who still prefer the old way of watching the game on television channels didn’t have to worry, those who depended on the live-streaming platform were left in a frenzy due to Hotstar’s untimely outage.
For the unversed, the outage happened in the afternoon when Indian bowlers were making Australian batters dance to their tunes. Downdetector.in, the website that provides real-time coverage of issues related to the status of various sites, registered over 1000 reports of Hotstar’s blackout.
Former Indian cricketer Abhinav Mukund tweeted, “Is it me or is the Hotstar app down? It keeps saying an error has occurred, anyone got a fix for it?”
Unlike many of its Indian competitors, Hotstar is known for its smooth and uninterrupted sports streaming. Today was a rare bad day, and as it turned out, the blackout happened because the company forgot to renew its registration, which expired today.
“Just read a reason why Hotstar has been down. Can’t stop laughing right now. The domain expired and someone forgot to renew it. Woah… if that’s true, this year’s Diwali bonuses are already out of the window,” tweeted K Shriniwas Rao, the veteran sports journalist.
As far as the match is concerned, Australian captain Pat Cummins won the toss and decided to bat first at Arjun Jaitley Stadium. They dropped Scott Boland and added another spinner Matthew Kuhnemann, while India replaced Suryakumar Yadav with Shreyas Iyer.
Usman Khawaja and David Warner started off strongly before the latter fell prey to Mohammed Shami. Khawaja used both conventional and reverse sweeps to perfection, scoring 81 before Ravindra Jadeja got the better of him. Steven Smith and Marnus Labuschagne were dismissed in the same over of R Ashwin.
Peter Handscomb too played his part, forging a crucial stand with the skipper Pat Cummins to push Australia past 200, which looked improbable at one point. Cummins’ downfall was triggered by Jadeja, who followed it up with another wicket, of Todd Murphy who tried to play an expansive drive but totally missed the line of the ball.
