ESPN Fantasy App Crashes on Frst Sunday of NFL Season

If there’s one thing that today’s NFL fans need on Sunday, it’s fantasy football.But much to the dismay of many fans, one platform has failed to deliver.

ESPN fantasy app crashes on first Sunday of NFL seasonESPN ran into a big problem over the weekend, when the site’s fantasy sports platform crashed, causing both the site and the ESPN Fantasy Football app unreachable for hours.

The company confirmed the outage, which started around the same time as the first round of the NFL games, on their Twitter account, tweeting: “We are aware of the current technical difficulties. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve the issue ASAP.”

More than four hours later, ESPN announced that the Fantasy Football platform has been restored. In a statement to Tech Crunch, the company said the crash was caused by a “backend data access issue,” which was “resolved as quickly as possible.”

“Fantasy Football is restored. We will continue to monitor,” ESPN said in another tweet. “Issue did not impact data for teams, leagues or rosters. We sincerely apologize.”

But the damage has already been done, and many die hard fantasy sports fans are disappointed at ESPN for “ruining the greatest day of the year for all of America.”

Other fantasy sports operation, such as Yahoo’s, are working just fine. Ideally, some customers would just head to other sites, but ESPN fantasy players are locked into the platform for the rest of the season since they have already drafted teams and joined season-long leagues.

ESPN, which incorporates fantasy sports into its coverage of real games, claimed to be “the most widely used fantasy football site” in the United States, with an estimated 7.1 million unique Fantasy Football app users in October 2015. ESPN said 1.7 million teams were drafted in less than two days in August, when the media company launched its first televised 28-hour fantasy football marathon.