The Disney Hotstar fiasco

It is often said that small mistakes could end up attracting a big penalty.

Something on those lines likely occurred yesterday when users of the Disney Hotstar OTT streaming service found themselves being shut out of the live telecast of the ongoing India Australia cricket test match. While the on-screen error message purportedly pointed to a network error, enterprising individuals traced its genesis to a lack of a timely renewal of the domain 'hotstar.com'. If true, this is a major gaffe indeed, not expected from an enterprise that has millions of customers.

While the company will surely investigate, identify and hopefully prevent such a recurrence, a larger message needs to be taken from this incident - do not take operational continuity for granted. Organizations should invest some time periodically in assessing factors which could impact its operations, their likelihood; impact, and based on an acceptable trade-off between their risk-appetite and budget for control mechanisms - mitigate these factors.

Sharing below a link to an article that appeared in the Mint publication on the Hotstar outage.

Did Hotstar crash after forgetting to renew domain? Here's what we know | Mint (livemint.com)