Millions of people participate in Fantasy Football leagues. Yahoo! Fantasy Football fans did not get that joy yesterday.
The Washington Post is reporting that Yahoo!’s Fantasy Football website went down sometime yesterday, as players were busy preparing their teams for the upcoming Fantasy season. Users of the site reported on Twitter that they couldn’t draft anyone, or that their teams were missing, and that rosters included players nobody chose. Yahoo was still working on the problem early this morning, with a web page full of apologies.
“We know how important Draft Day is to all of our players, and we want to apologize to those of you who were affected,” the company said.
Yahoo! worked feverishly through the morning to get the website running again. Being the first week of Fantasy Football, fans were still putting teams together, drafting, and trading. Yahoo! suffered this at a dangerous time, being that they compete with the NFL, ESPN, and other websites in Fantasy Football, which draws much advertising traffic to their website.
Fantasy Football is an immensely popular interactive online competition where users build fantasy teams in an online draft featuring real NFL players. Teams earn points based on what the players do in real life games during football season. Host websites like Yahoo Fantasy Sports manage the draft and keep score throughout the season. Millions of people play Fantasy Football but it’s not clear how many were affected.
KARE11 is reporting that Fantasy players are having issues from having the wrong players on their roster to having no players on their roster. Some users couldn’t gain access to their teams and were unable to get to the Yahoo! Fantasy Football website at all. Those who were able to log in were just as quickly kicked out. Users who had completed their drafts and were able to gain access to the website found their teams with either players they didn’t draft or no players at all.
Social media exploded with frustrated fantasy owners venting. Yahoo! began tweeting, apologizing for the inconvenience. They even set up a page to keep users up-to-date on their site issues.
“We just kind of called an audible and chose to quit the draft and reschedule” said Brau.
Yahoo! says their engineers worked through the night to get the problem fixed, and they claim leagues drafting Monday and beyond should be okay.
As of this writing, the Fantasy Football link seems to be up and running. Check with your Fantasy League Commissioner to verify that all is well and working.
