Hulu's Livestream Cut off the Oscars Right Before the Biggest Awards of the Night

For all of its history, the Oscars were only available to people with a linear cable subscription. Watching the ceremony was nearly impossible if you were a cord cutter, but Disney decided to change its approach for the 2025 ceremony, livestreaming the entire thing on Hulu.

This livestream was hugely convenient but it also cut the ceremony off a little after 10:30 ET, while the awards show was still happening and before a couple of the night's biggest honors had been handed out. Here's what we know about why Hulu cut the Oscars off early.

If you were watching the Oscars on Hulu, a message popped up that said "thank you for watching" and told you "the live event has now ended," even though you likely knew that this was not the case. Best Actress and Best Picture had yet to be awarded, but Hulu didn't seem to think those awards were all that important.

Naturally, Reddit and Twitter began blowing up with people complaining about what appeared to be a major technical SNAFU.

The error appears to have been a scheduling one. The streamer gave the Oscars a set end time of 10:32 PM EST, which meant that if the ceremony lasted past that time, viewers would be kicked off the stream. That cutoff time was designed to give the awards ceremony breathing room, but because of some long-winded acceptance speeches, the ceremony ran super long, and Hulu viewers did not get the chance to see how the ceremony ended.

“This evening, we experienced technical and live stream issues on Hulu which impacted some Oscars viewers,” Disney said in an official statement following the event. “We apologize for the experience and will make a full replay of the event available as soon as possible.”

Some Hulu users also had issues logging in to the streamer early on in the ceremony, but cutting the stream off early was an even more significant blunder.

This is not the first time that Hulu has had this kind scheduling issue with a live event. In 2018, they cut the Super Bowl off before the game had ended for similar reasons.

It's unclear why Hulu needs to set an end-time for its live streams, but what's even more confusing is why they would set one that was so questionable for a ceremony that is notorious for running long. Giving awards to a bunch of theater kids naturally leads to tons of long speeches.

If Hulu is going to host an Oscars livestream moving forward, they should set the end time for much later, giving themselves plenty of cushion to ensure that the event doesn't get cut off. It was especially unfortunate last night because of one of the night's biggest upsets, Mikey Madison's victory for Anora, was not part of the Hulu broadcast. In the year 2025, one would hope these kind of technical glitches would be a thing of the past.