HLS Streaming: Captions appearing ahead of time post Cloudflare incident

I’m reaching out to this knowledgeable community for assistance with an issue that’s cropped up following the recent Cloudflare data plane incident on November 4.

Like many of you, I rely on HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) for broadcasting content to my audience. However, since the aforementioned Cloudflare incident, I’ve been experiencing a peculiar glitch where the captions on my streams are being displayed prematurely. This sync issue is understandably causing confusion for viewers, as the text does not match the audio/video feed in real-time.

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

  • The captions are consistently showing up a few seconds ahead of the corresponding content.
  • This issue started immediately after the Cloudflare incident.
  • It’s occurring across different devices and platforms.

I’ve done a bit of troubleshooting on my own—checking my encoding settings, ensuring there are no errors with the caption files, and even rolling back any recent changes to my setup. Despite these efforts, the problem persists.

I would really appreciate if anyone who’s faced a similar issue, or has expertise in HLS streaming and caption synchronization, could share their insights or suggest potential solutions.

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Thank you for reporting @ml16 we’re investigating!

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This issue should be resolving itself gradually over the next three hours. Thanks for your patience @ml16

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Is it a caching issue @renan?

@ml16 No, it was a software rollout that was paused during the incident on November 4 causing this inconsistency. We decided to go forward and finish with the rollout to solve this issue.

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