Yahoo's Server Crashes Before Fantasy Football Game

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Yahoo learned a hard lesson when its server went down before kickoff on Sunday. Fantasy Football players turned to Twitter to vent their frustration.

Yahoo Fantasy Football

Yahoo's site is one of the most popular for Fantasy Football game players. When users were able to log into the site, they saw this message:

"We apologize sincerely for the outage on Sunday. We are working on the fix-the site is stabilized-and will update everyone on next steps for how to handle week 10. Currently, data and scores can be viewed on our mobile apps but for now you cannot make transactions or change line-ups from the apps."

Head of Yahoo Sports Ken Fuchs also sent this email to Fantasy Football players:

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

Discussion Starters:

  • What, if any, impact do you think the outage will have on Yahoo users next season?
  • What's your opinion of Fuchs's email? What works well, and what could be improved?