Last-minute upgrade caused South African streaming platform to crash before Bafana Bafana’s first World Cup match
The SABC+ streaming platform experienced an outage on Thursday evening, shortly before the highly anticipated FIFA World Cup 2026 kick-off, due to a surge in simultaneous login attempts.
“A content encryption update had to be implemented on the SABC+ platform, which is a standard part of broadcasting major international sporting events,” the public broadcaster said.
“This update required a reset of the platform’s functionalities, meaning some users needed to log in again.”
This resulted in a high volume of users attempting to log in and verify access simultaneously shortly before kick-off, which the SABC said placed unprecedented strain on the system.
“This resulted in system instability and a second reset before the platform was stabilised,” the state-owned company said.
“The scale of demand last night was unprecedented. SABC+ recorded a peak concurrency of 477,000 simultaneous users, nearly three times its previous record.”
By the end of the match, users had made a total of 18 million login attempts to get into the app and see the game.
Many viewers reported on social media that they were unable to access the SABC+ webpage or app ahead of the South Africa versus Mexico match-up.
“Are you aware of the problems that people are experiencing???? I’ve been trying to connect since 19:30????” said X/Twitter user @_HeyApril.
“Your website and app is not working! Yoh!” said another. By the end of the evening, this post received over 78 comments with users voicing their annoyance at the untimely outage.
The SABC only notified users that they were required to re-login to the platform due to the new updates minutes ahead of the match, while the opening ceremony was underway.
“We recognise that the app update notice issued shortly before kick-off added to viewer frustration, and we acknowledge that the timing of this communication fell short of what our viewers deserve.”
The SABC said that its technical teams have conducted a full review of the incident and would implement measures to strengthen platform capacity ahead of upcoming matches.
A new record for SABC+
The SABC said it would also review its internal communication protocols to ensure viewers were notified of any necessary changes with appropriate lead time.
In total, 2.4 million viewers were recorded on the SABC+ platform by the end of the match, with SABC+ seeing a record peak concurrency of 477,000 simultaneous users.
“This level of demand reflects the importance South Africans place on SABC+ as a platform for free, universal access to events of national significance such as the FIFA World Cup,” it said.
“The SABC remains committed to ensuring that all South Africans have reliable access to SABC+ throughout the FIFA World Cup, and thanks viewers for their patience and continued support.”
The DStv website also went down on Thursday evening, as MultiChoice’s service saw a large influx of users attempting to log in at once.
Attempting to access DStv.com, where people can sign up and manage their subscription, resulted in an HTTP 503 Service Unavailable server error.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed users reporting problems with DStv since before 17:45 on Thursday evening.
Fortunately, the downtime on DStv’s account management system did not impact its streaming service, hosted at DStv.stream, and existing subscribers could watch the game with minimal interruption.
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