Hulu’s (Brief) Identity Crisis… And Who Is Scott Gibson?

Friday, 10 December 2010 05:14

Hulu’s (Brief) Identity Crisis… And Who Is Scott Gibson?

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In the last twenty minutes we’ve gotten a slew of tips that indicate that something is off at popular video streaming portal Hulu. According to our tipsters, and numerous reports on Twitter, Hulu users are logging onto the site to find that their playlist queues have been replaced with another user’s.

That’s strange in and of itself, but, in a bizarre twist, the majority of these reports seem to indicate that the same mysterious user profiles keep popping up in place of

their own. I’ve seen at least ten reports of Scott Gibson; Joel Nesbit’s account is similarly pervasive.

We’ve reached out to Hulu to ask what the problem is. Clearly there’s some serious glitching going on; hopefully users are simply seeing a few test accounts. Obviously Hulu’s content isn’t as private as, say, Facebook or Google’s. But it’s still unnerving to log in and see someone else’s name.

Update: Here’s a statement from Hulu:
The bug was the result of an incorrect cache header sent to Hulu’s CDN, and was identified and fixed within 5 minutes. No more than 14 users may have been affected. We deeply regret the error, and have taken precautions to ensure this will not happen again.