ITVX crashes minutes before Love Island, leaving fans frustrated as the popular reality show goes live with no streaming fix in sight.
Fans scramble to watch Love Island as ITVX crashes just before the show airs (Photo: X)
Love Island All Stars: ITVX, the streaming service of ITV, experienced a massive outage just minutes before the new episode of Love Island was set to air. Thousands of viewers were left disappointed as the service showed an error message and the outage occurred at 9pm, which is peak time for the reality show, making it one of the most prominent technical failures experienced by the broadcaster this year.
Shortly before the broadcast is about to begin, the audience started seeing the following prompt “Video error. Please try restarting the app. If that fails, we're having an issue that we're trying to fix, so try again later.” The glitch was present on various media devices, such as computers, phones, smart TVs, etc. However, some fans were able to avoid it by accessing the broadcasts through iPads.
The outage occurred just as the highly anticipated episode was about to reveal itself-the one in which newcomer Jessy steps into the villa and the drama from the heart-rate challenge unfolds. Fans were finding themselves scrambling to watch on other devices or even scrolling through family members phones and the disruption didn't just pause the show; it put a dent in the shared buzz that Love Island usually sparks online.
When the episode finally aired, ITV did not implement the quick fix that would help all those who had been affected by the problem. According to their official notes, the issues were due to technical glitch problems. However, the frustration persisted some fans were still unable to watch their favorite episode even 15 minutes into the schedule.
ITVX live outages are nothing unusual. Over the last year or so, ITVX has shocked viewers with occasional jolts during the broadcast of huge popular shows. According to experts, a huge number of viewers accessing the site simultaneously is probably the cause, particularly with popular shows such as 'Love Island,' featuring over 3 million viewers per episode.
Viewers took to X/Twitter to let off steam about the problem. “Omg wtf how am I gonna watch Love Island ITV!!” one excited user wrote, while another user chimed in with the words, “HELLO!!?? ITV fix up it’s 21:00.” This was in reference to the popularity of ITV and its importance in transmitting content to its younger, more tech-savvy audience.
It has led people to question the reliability of ITVX as a platform. Also, a few people were quick to point out the silver lining in the fact that there were quick workarounds as well. A social media analysis reveals that tweets reporting frustration manifested in the first half-hour of the outage with #ITVXDown trending across the country.
LiveStream the third season of Love Island: All Stars at no cost on ITVX with a VPN like ExpressVPN, you can access the platform from anywhere worldwide.
The third season of Love Island: All Stars starts on Jan. 15.
