INQUISITR.COM / Sports

CBS Sports Site Goes Down: Last-Minute NCAA Tournament Bracket Fans Out Of Luck

By Nathan Francis
Published on: 04:08 PST, Mar 16, 2017

The CBS Sports site has gone down late Thursday morning, leaving last-minute NCAA Tournament entrants out of luck and unable to submit their picks before the first games started at noon.

The CBS NCAA Tournament website first went down close to an hour before tipoff of the first March Madness game, and it remained down through the start of the game. As of 12 p.m. ET on Thursday, it was working only intermittently, with most users seeing an internal server error message.

It’s not yet clear what took down the site, though it is likely a higher-than-normal volume to the site to fill out and make last-minute changes on March Madness brackets. There was no announcement from CBS Sports about when the site may be up or whether those making changes when the site went down will be able to save their changes.

Word of the CBS Sports NCAA Tournament site going down spread quickly across the internet on Thursday morning, garnering attention from Reddit’s College Basketball subreddit.

“Anyone else having trouble making last minute edits to their brackets on CBS?” wrote one person. “For the past 25 minutes I’ve been trying to get into my office pool to no avail – the page just keeps loading endlessly. WTF CBS?!?!”

There were complaints across the internet, with many taking to Twitter to voice their displeasure.

Many noted that CBS Sports previously had difficulty in other years and should have foreseen the problems with the website.

Others compared the situation to ESPN’s snafu during the NFL season, when the fantasy football site experienced major glitches that kept users from seeing live scores or making changes to their roster.

“Yup, CBS is hot garbage right now due to traffic,” one Reddit user wrote. “It’s inexcusable, and I don’t understand how these things happen. Same thing happened to ESPN in fantasy football week 1.”

That was quite a controversial mishap at the time, as ESPN is among the leading platforms for fantasy football leagues. It took nearly the entire day for ESPN to explain the problem, releasing a brief statement about the outage, Deadspin noted.

ESPN Fantasy is restored and we will continue to monitor. We identified a backend data access issue and resolved as quickly as possible. The issue did not impact data for teams, leagues or rosters. We sincerely apologize to all ESPN fantasy users.

But this situation could be even more serious. With the CBS Sports website going down, thousands — or potentially millions — of NCAA Tournament brackets will be impacted. With many groups and offices using the CBS platform to submit brackets, it’s not clear if there will be any remedy

UPDATE: The CBSSports.com website appeared to be back up by 12:30 p.m. ET, though some online were still complaining that they could not access the site. The brackets were locked once the site had returned, meaning those needing to make last-minute changes or input their picks were out of luck, with no way to go back. There has not yet been a statement from CBS Sports about what may have been wrong with the website.

[Featured Image by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images]

Share this article: CBS Sports Site Goes Down: Last-Minute NCAA Tournament Bracket Fans Out Of Luck
More from Inquisitr