Britton Colquitt, the kicker for the Cleveland Browns was about to launch the first kickoff of the 2016 football season to the Eagles at 1 p.m. Sunday afternoon. Just like millions of other Americans, I clicked my ESPN fantasy football app on my phone, waiting to see the first scoring update of the season from my fantasy team and nothing happened.
I figured that my phone did not load the app due to a bad connection to the internet. I turned my Wi-Fi off and tried to get on the app again and still nothing happened.
At this point, I started to get a little bit frustrated. I opened my Twitter app which, surely enough was working just fine, when I found a string of about five tweets talking about these fellow fantasy sports player could not access their fantasy football scores on ESPN.
The ESPN Fantasy Sports servers had crashed.
Ironically enough this same thing happened week one of last years NFL season and also did not go well with some users. According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association data, more than 57 million users played fantasy sports in 2015. With that number increasing every single year, and a majority of these players using ESPN’s website to host their leagues, this undoubtedly affected a whole lot of people.
ESPN, who had released their “number 1” fantasy app on the market earlier this summer eventually acknowledged the incident about an hour after fans started to lose connection to their leagues, via their ESPN Fantasy Sports Twitter Account.
This outrage also caused other ESPN fantasy sports programs like their very popular fantasy baseball leagues to crash as well, leaving owners across the globe to wonder how their team was fairing in their playoff match-ups early Sunday afternoon.
At 6:30 p.m., ESPN finally notified their users via Twitter that their fantasy games had been completely restored.
As somebody who plays ESPN fantasy football, I was not surprised. Last year on opening Sunday, the same thing happened. It is starting to become a routine thing with the Disney-owned ESPN and their fantasy sports agent. If this incident continues it will definitely begin to drive some team owners away from the app and to possibly join their top competitor, Yahoo Sports.
I know that I will not leave ESPN and play fantasy football elsewhere, solely because everyone in my league is used to it. Adjusting to a new platform on a new website would be a struggle and will not be worth it, especially this stage as my league enters its 7th year.
But I know for some others who are relatively new to the site, if ESPN cannot get their game together quickly, they will take their business somewhere else, and the fantasy app with millions upon on millions of downloads will eventually be off their phones.
