It’s been a tough few weeks for Twitch, but it continues to get tougher as streamers became unable to go live on the platform.
Users of the streaming platform Twitch have been unable to start their live streams on the service. Users also cannot currently make any purchases on the website because of related technical issues.
Purchases could include subscriptions, gifted subscriptions and bits. The issues don't appear to be affecting streams that were started before the problems arose. Those streamers may still be left inadvertently out of pocket because of the lack of purchasing on the platform.
Some streamers didn't want to wait for Twitch to come back online and started streamer over on YouTube Gaming instead. Hearthstone streamer Roffle wasted no time in going live on the competing platform. His stream quickly gathered pace and held over 1,000 viewers within the first half hour.
The issues come just days after Twitch announced that they would be cutting back the revenue split for streamers in their partner program. Whereas previously partnered streamers would receive 70% of all revenue, they will now only earn that on the first $100,000 that they earn each year. After that threshold, it will slip back down to the original 50/50 rate.
The platform recently gave up exclusivity rights for streamers under their partner program, meaning that they are legally free to go and stream on other platforms during the downtime.
The outage happened during peak hours for advertising and gifting subs. It was also during the special "Subtember" initiative which gives discounts on gifted subscriptions. The longer that the website remains down, the bigger the losses will be for the company.
Issues going live
Twitch users started noticing the problem when they began to see error messages both on Twitch and in the broadcasting app, OBS.
When encountered on the Twitch website, the site displays "Twitch Error 500". This is an internal server error. This means that the server is having difficulty connecting following a request and is unable to fulfil it as a result.
The OBS error message says: "Failed to load channel information for Twitch." This again points toward the issue being a behind-the-scenes server issue at Twitch.
Troubleshooting the problem
Twitch are investigating the problems regarding people starting live streams.
"We are investigating an issue preventing some users from going live," Twitch said through the TwitchSupport Twitter account.
After being unable to find a quick and easy fix for the problem, Twitch issued a further update regarding the issue.
"We are continue to investigate," Twitch added. "At this time the issue is preventing some users from going live and preventing purchases from being completed. Thank you for your reports."
There does not appear to be a fix available for the problem at the moment. Twitch, as stated, are investigating the issue.
Stay tuned to esports.gg for updates on when Twitch fixes the issue and streamers are able to go live once again.