Staff Opinion: Computer server problems at Yahoo! leads to frustrated fantasy football players | People

Fantasy football is typically played online and allows players to virtually manage a team of real life players.  The better a player does in real life, the more points for their fantasy teams.

According to ask.com, nearly 50 million people play fantasy football.  To some, this “sport” has become more popular than the actual game itself. 

So when some of those participants were unable to “manage” their teams this past Sunday, the outcry of frustrated fans was well documented on social media.

One of the largest providers of fantasy football, Yahoo! Sports, experienced technical difficulties with their computer servers. 

Preventing those who participate in their fantasy football leagues from making changes to their rosters before the noon NFL games began. 

Prime time, for many “owners” who chose to wait until the last minute to set their team lineups to account for injuries or last minute news that might affect game play.

Frustrated fans took to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to voice their dissatisfaction. 

That uproar led to several responses from Yahoo! via Twitter.   

One @YahooFootball tweet said, "We are aware of slowness on some fantasy servers and our engineers are investigating."

Monday, Ken Fuchs,  the head of Yahoo! Sports issued a formal statement via e-mail to all of their fantasy football participants.

Dear Yahoo! Fantasy Users,

I want to sincerely apologize to all of you about today's Yahoo! Sports Fantasy outage. As the head of Yahoo! Sports and as a Yahoo! Sports fantasy player myself, I am disappointed that we failed all of our fans today. Our first priority is having the best experience for our users, and today we fell short.

The outage started around Noon ET (awful timing we know) and while our team was on it immediately we are still working on various pieces. Our team is continuing to work on identifying and resolving the root cause. We have restored full functionality on the website, and we're working for a final fix for our mobile apps. Currently data and scores can be viewed but for now you cannot make transactions or change line-ups from the apps.

We will also use today as an opportunity to improve our set-up so that we hopefully never have an outage like this again. Our fantasy commissioners and players are our biggest priority - we pride ourselves in being able to offer our users with the best fantasy sports experience possible and we take our job to deliver that to you very seriously. Rest assured we will work hard to make sure we continue to deliver on that commitment.

Thanks for playing with us and your patience today,

Ken Fuchs

Head of Yahoo! Sports

Those Fantasy football owners who usually have no one to blame but themselves when their teams struggles to put up points, now have a new scapegoat.  At least that’s who I blame for my Week 10 Fantasy Football loss.