Yahoo Fails Fantasy Owners At Worst Possible Time

Sunday afternoon marked a new low for fantasy sports players around the world when Yahoo’s successful fantasy site went down just an hour before kickoff which in turn meant no changing lineups, no adding or dropping players due to injuries and no way to keep track of how your fantasy team was doing. It was a very long afternoon for many fantasy owners who are addicted to watching how their team is doing on a consistent basis.

I have played fantasy sports on Yahoo for over a decade and have never seen a day like that happen on a Sunday when all the NFL games are about to start. The outage lasted well into the late afternoon before finally coming back online sometime around 5pm Central time.  

Ken Fuchs, the head of Yahoo Sports, sent out an email to fantasy owners early Monday morning apologizing for the outage and saying that the company will use this opportunity to “improve their setup” so this may never happen again. The problem is that the issue still isn’t fully fixed with mobile users not able to make transactions or change their lineups. Yahoo has posted a message about steps that will be taken to handle Week 10. I’m very interested to see what steps those are.

There are a ton of very angry fantasy owners out there this morning. This is an chance for sites like ESPN and CBSSports.com to jump all over the chance to get even more users to their sites for fantasy sports because there may be a mass exodus away from Yahoo after this epic fail right in the stretch run of the season. We all know technology fails but something like what happened Sunday can’t happen again.