Lightbox "tracked the popularity of The Handmaid's Tale for six months before buying it".

Spark's video on-demand service Lightbox is back up and running after an upgrade caused the website to go down for hundreds of customers across the country.

Nearly 250 customers reported the Lightbox crash about 8pm on Thursday, according to the outage detection website Down Detector, as many viewers were watching the latest episode of The Handmaid's Tale, season two.

Spark spokeswoman Ellie Cross said the Lightbox team deployed a fix at around 11:30pm on Thursday night and the platform was running smoothly Friday morning.

SUPPLIED Many users received this message when Lightbox went down.

"While the majority of viewers would not have noticed any impact, a number of people were unable to access Lightbox or experienced degraded quality when watching content."

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Were you affected? Contact newstips@stuff.co.nz

Customers reported being unable to watch any videos or log into their accounts.

Cross said the technical issues stemmed from a platform upgrade that was rolled out Thursday morning.

The issue would not have "any bearing" on Spark's Rugby World Cup coverage, Cross said

N/A Many customers were mid-way through a new episode of The Handmaid's Tale Season two.

Spark is poised to announce what platform will be used to broadcast the Rugby World Cup in the coming months. Cross said the platform would have a "specialist capability for live sports streaming".

Disgruntled Handmaid's Tale fans complained about the outage on Twitter.

Yeah I can't even logon. How am I supposed to watch @HandmaidsOnHulu why would you schedule an update on the day you release the new ep #rookiemistake do the update earlier in the week so the spotlight isn't on you so much — Brett Wilkie (@brettwilkie84) May 17, 2018

HULU/YouTube Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard in the chilling trailer for the feminist series.

Trying to be patient, but being half way through that handmaids tale episode and this wait is slowly killing me — Meg Snowdon (@Meg_Snowdon) May 17, 2018

Argh no new episode of #HandmaidsTale !!!! You're killing me, @LightboxNZ — Emma Woolford (@Emjw26) May 17, 2018