Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football Players Not Happy After Website Suffers Outage Just Prior to Week 10 NFL Action

by Ricky Doyle on Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 8:41AM

There are a lot of disgruntled fantasy football owners this Monday morning, but not because of anything that actually happened on the gridiron.

Fantasy football players everywhere experienced a tough break prior to Sunday’s Week 10 NFL action when Yahoo! Sports’ servers went down just before the 1 p.m. EST games. The temporary crash — during which Yahoo! Sports was either unresponsive or very slow — prohibited players from making any last minute lineup adjustments, which understandably has some people a little hot under the collar.

For many, this probably wasn’t issue. But for those who decided to wait until the last minute to set their weekly lineup, it’s a major issue. After all, fantasy football has become as big as the games themselves, and we’re starting to get into crunch time of the fantasy season.

Apparently, Yahoo! understands just how big of a mishap Sunday’s situation was, however, as the following e-mail was sent out to Yahoo! fantasy users.

Dear Yahoo! Fantasy Users,

I want to sincerely apologize to all of you about today’s Yahoo! Sports Fantasy outage. As the head of Yahoo! Sports and as a Yahoo! Sports fantasy player myself, I am disappointed that we failed all of our fans today. Our first priority is having the best experience for our users, and today we fell short.

The outage started around Noon ET (awful timing we know) and while our team was on it immediately we are still working on various pieces. Our team is continuing to work on identifying and resolving the root cause. We have restored full functionality on the website, and we’re working for a final fix for our mobile apps. Currently data and scores can be viewed but for now you cannot make transactions or change line-ups from the apps.

We will also use today as an opportunity to improve our set-up so that we hopefully never have an outage like this again. Our fantasy commissioners and players are our biggest priority — we pride ourselves in being able to offer our users with the best fantasy sports experience possible and we take our job to deliver that to you very seriously. Rest assured we will work hard to make sure we continue to deliver on that commitment.

Thanks for playing with us and your patience today,

Ken Fuchs
Head of Yahoo! Sports

In order to see how frustrated people were with the situation, one mustn’t look any further than the Twitterverse, where owners came out in large numbers to voice their displeasure. Much of that displeasure came in the form of profanity, so we won’t repeat, but rest assured that it wasn’t pretty.

Photo of the Day

Thank you, indeed.

Quote of the Day

He’s a bad ass. You watch him on tape, you watch him on TV, you can’t really get a grasp of how fast he is, how big he is. I had no idea.
–Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher, clearly impressed by Texans running back Arian Foster