There is one window every high school coach and Hudl customer circles on the calendar, and it runs from roughly 7 to 10 pm on Friday nights in the fall.
Unfortunately for the tech giant, that is exactly when the platform went sideways last week.
At 8:31 pm Central (9:31pm EST) on Friday, October 16, Hudl posted on its official status page that it was “currently investigating” a problem it later labeled “Live Stream and Focus Replay Freezing along with Stalled Uploads in Library.”
For a standard 7 pm kickoff, that timestamp lands somewhere in the third or fourth quarter.
Fans who paid to watch on livestreams saw the picture freeze. Staffs using Focus Replay on the sideline lost their in-game access. Staffs that went back to the office to start the breakdown found uploads stuck in the queue for far too long.
The outage tracker StatusGator logged user reports from Nebraska, Oregon and Texas that night, including one that read simply, “Two different football games are frozen.” Another user on IsDown wrote that they “Cant view a game in Belleville WI.”
Hudl posted “continuing to investigate” updates at 8:42 and 9:41pm Central, said it had identified the issue at 10:16pm, and reported a fix in place at 10:51pm. But by that time, most of the country’s games were final.
The bigger headache for coaches came Saturday.
At 8:53am Central, Hudl said live streams and Focus Replay were working again, but it was still investigating “Unpublished Videos / Stalled Uploads.” The company said it identified that problem at 10:04am., was “continuing to work on the fix” at 2:07pm , and didn’t post that a fix had been implemented until 8:51pm Saturday night.
For high school staffs, Saturday morning is film day. It is when you grade your own kids, finish cutting up next week’s opponent and get the scouting report moving. When the game won’t publish until Saturday night, all of that slides into Sunday, and in October nobody has a spare Sunday sitting around as teams prepare for playoffs right around the corner.
This also wasn’t the first hiccup of the fall. Hudl’s own status page shows a “Videos not populating in Hudl Library” incident on October 5, and IsDown tracked upload failures across Hudl products on September 3, teams missing video in their library on September 17 and livestream problems on September 25.
To Hudl’s credit, the company has shown it listens. In July, we shared the story of Hudl adding multi-select and search-to-filter tools for breakdown data within days of tweet that went viral tweet about cleaning up thousands of mislabeled play names. Hudl’s Nate Patterson took the time and effort to lay out the solution publicly.
Coaches will now hold the company to that same standard. A status page update that reads “we are continuing to investigate this issue” works on a Tuesday afternoon. On a Friday night in October, with the second half frozen and film day on hold, coaches want to know what broke and whether it’s fixed for this week, and many of them voiced that same sentiment on social media.
As of Monday morning, the incident on Hudl’s status page still sat at “monitoring,” with no explanation of the cause.
With playoff brackets set to fill out over the next few weeks, Friday nights only get bigger from here on out.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.