Roku experienced a significant service outage on Wednesday night, leading to some of the company’s streaming devices and even Roku TVs getting stuck on the loading screen or going through a reboot loop and effectively becoming unusable. Roku TVs from TCL, Hisense and other manufacturers were affected.
Users took to social media and Roku’s subreddit to report problems with their Roku hardware, and Down Detector spiked for Roku’s services. The company’s support account acknowledged the lingering problems around 8:30 p.m. ET.
“Roku is aware of an issue reported by users who are unable to access some Roku services,” the company said. “If you try to activate your device, please try again later. It is our priority to resolve this as soon as possible and we ask that you be patient with us as we resolve this issue.” Late Wednesday night, the company’s services appeared to be back up and running for those who had experienced the downtime.
In a scathing charge against smart TVs, some customers had issues using devices connected to their Roku TV’s HDMI ports, such as cable boxes or game consoles, during the service outage as the TVs failed to wake up after a factory reset. . satisfying users found workarounds for that dilemma.
Some services = all services. I can’t even watch my own cable provider or any other input on the TV
— Jeff T (@JeffTur66397772) January 20, 2022
This is crazy. I can’t even use my DVD player. So much for modern technology. I think I should go find my old tube TV with a cord
— Banana the Black Cat (@BlackcatBananna) January 20, 2022
The edge reached out to Roku to find out more about what went wrong. Not all customers were affected by the service issues.