Twitch megastar Ibai Llanos slammed the platform for outages during his annual streamer vs. streamer boxing match, which broke Twitch’s world viewing records three times in a single stream on Saturday. At one point, Llanos’ channel reached a peak of nearly 3.45 million concurrent viewers.
Llanos hosted the third edition of his marquee event, La Velada del Año, which translates to “The Night of the Year,” before a crowd of more than 70,000 at the Civitas Metropolitano soccer stadium in Madrid, Spain on Saturday. Even before the event started, the bar was set high, with many people waiting to see if the Spanish-speaking community’s biggest streamer—who already held the world record for most live viewers on Twitch—would be able to make history once more.
They didn’t have to wait long. Llanos beat his own record during the event’s first fight, which pitted Twitch streamer Andrés López, better known as Ampeterby7, against Spanish pop star Abraham Mateo. The fight drew in 3.41 million viewers, according to Streams Charts, breaking Llanos’ previous world record of 3.35 million set during last year’s boxing match.
However, problems with Twitch began to show up during the second match of the night between Mexican Twitch streamer Samy “Rivers” Rivera and Spanish TikToker Marina Rivera, who is known as “La Rivers,” at around 2 p.m. ET. More than 5,200 users reported problems with Twitch on the outage tracker Downdetector at that time. Over on Twitter, #Twitch was trending, with many users stating that the app wasn’t working.
Llanos addressed the outages during the short break in the fight between Rivers and La Rivers, expressing disappointment that Twitch hadn’t made better preparations to accommodate for traffic to the Velada livestream.
“It’s a shame because I think Twitch is down. I think Twitch is acting weird. Lots of people are telling us this in the chat. We’re in contact with Twitch because the truth is it’s a shame to put on this event and then see that a platform with $300 million isn’t capable of providing a good server, but we’re trying and let’s see if we could fix it with a little bit of luck,” Llanos said. “Everyone, we’re sorry this is happening but there’s little we can do here. We’re sorry.”
Gizmodo reached out to Twitch on Saturday and Sunday for comment on the outages and Llanos’ statements but did not immediately receive a response.
Despite the problems with Twitch, Llanos would go on to break his world viewing record two more times throughout the event, which also featured musical performances from top artists in the Spanish-speaking world, including Ozuna, Lola Índigo, Quevedo, and Duki. The Spanish streamer reached 3.42 million concurrent viewers during Quevedo’s performance and 3.44 million viewers during the last fight of the night between Argentine streamer Coscu, whose real name Martín Pérez, and Chilean YouTuber Germán Garmendia.
Although these numbers are certainly impressive, the real amount of people watching the stream was likely much higher, as many gather to watch Velada together. In those cases, while there might be five people watching the stream, Twitch only counts connected devices as viewers, which means it would register that case as only one viewer. This is in addition to the people who couldn’t view the event because of the outage on Twitch.
Overall, Llanos’ eight-hour stream of La Velada del Año III maintained an average of 2.89 million live viewers throughout the event and drew in 15.19 million individual viewers. His accomplishment is another reminder of the might of the Spanish-speaking streaming community on Twitch, which dominates the list of channels with the most concurrent viewers of all-time.
“Thank you for being part of the biggest livestream in history. For creating another world record,” Llanos said on Twitter after the event. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you. July 1, 2023 will be unforgettable.”
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