One of the perils of streaming bundles is when a significant outage happens, which we’ve previously seen with DirecTV Now, YouTube TV and more. Well, a particularly embarrassing one for YouTube TV came Tuesday night, which just happened to be a major night on the sports calendar, featuring both the NBA’s opening doubleheader and Game 4 of the National League Championship Series. And that latter one, on FS1, has had a giant YouTube TV ad behind home plate as one of the revolving left-side ads, as seen below. (The whole NLCS is also presented by corporate sibling Google Assistant, as seen in the static right-side ad.)
This was part of a wider outage that saw every video on YouTube.com and the app delivering playback errors for many, but the live sports angle of the YouTube TV outage is particularly relevant here. Here are some of the tweets from the many people affected:
https://twitter.com/RedsArmy_John/status/1052367479375372288
https://twitter.com/MKing_89/status/1052366662811422722
https://twitter.com/abeghou/status/1052366746445914112
https://twitter.com/TheGussReport/status/1052377977638465536
Tweets there show issues started as early as 9:10 p.m. Eastern (during the postgame of Game 3 of the ALCS on TBS), and as per Down Detector, reports of issues really spiked around 9:20 p.m. Eastern. And as of 10 p.m. Eastern, the service remained down for many. For their part, YouTube tweeted that they’re working on it, and apologized for the inconvenience:
We’ll see when it gets fixed, and if YouTube TV offers free subscription extenders as they did after the World Cup semifinal crash this summer. The service has really tried to emphasize its sports content, including with deals as the presenting sponsor of the World Series (both last year and this year) and the NBA Finals (beginning earlier this year), but this certainly wasn’t a good moment for many who have turned to YouTube TV for their sports fix.
[Photo from Matthew King on Twitter]
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.