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Monday’s outage of Amazon Web Services—the cloud computing service that powers many major websites and apps—caused disruptions for a wide range of companies, from United Airlines and Fortnite to Amazon’s own website.
The sports world was not immune. The widespread outage, caused by an error contained in an early morning software update to AWS’s DynamoDB database service, persisted from around 3 a.m. Eastern Monday into Tuesday.
Ticketmaster had issues ahead of several big games Monday night. The Blue Jays, ahead of hosting the Mariners in Game 7 of the ALCS, posted a notice about the issue to fans on social media and encouraged them to “hold off on managing your tickets as we work through this.” The Blue Jays later posted that the system was returning to normal, but they would place additional staff at entry gates to help with any ticket issues.
NFL fans also had trouble accessing tickets ahead of Monday’s doubleheader. In Detroit, a Lions spokesperson said the “ticketing thing is being worked on” as Ticketmaster glitched ahead of Monday Night Football. In Seattle, the Seahawks acknowledged the outage and told fans: “Please be assured that you and your guests will be able to successfully enter the game tonight.”
Sports betting apps, including FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics Sportsbook, all had problems and alerted users on social media. “Please note that some withdrawals are still slow to process due to the outage overnight,” DraftKings posted. FanDuel posted updates as service was restored in certain areas, with New York, Puerto Rico, and Connecticut being the last shortly before midnight ET.
In the U.K., the Premier League announced it would start the Brentford–West Ham match without semi-automated offside technology, which uses cameras and artificial intelligence to track whether a player was offside. The change led to a longer-than-usual manual review for a goal that was ruled offside in the first half, but the technology was restored for the second half. Fellow EPL team Tottenham Hotspur postponed ticket sales for upcoming home games due to the disruption.
The popular fitness app Strava went down, briefly stopping users from logging and sharing their workouts until a little past noon ET. Strava’s website says it has more than 150 million users worldwide who share 51 million updates per week.
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