American rugby fans were left frustrated on Sunday morning when Universal Sports’ livestreaming website crashed during the US Eagles’ World Cup opener against Samoa.
Fans hoping to see the game online were greeted with a blank screen and a number of messages indicating that unexpectedly heavy traffic had caused the crash.
“Unfortunately, there was an Amazon outage this morning that affected our streaming partners which has interrupted the WatchRWC2015 PPV service,” said Universal Sports spokeswoman Catherine Philbin in an email to the Guardian.
Outages at Amazon Web Services were reported from 6am ET, causing disruption to sites including Amazon, Netflix, and imdb.com.
The USA versus Samoa game was also shown live on Universal Sports Network, but many fans had paid either $200 for livestreaming of all 48 games in the Rugby World Cup, which is being staged in England and Wales, or fees for single games starting at $27.95. Nine Rugby World Cup games are being shown live on US television – those games and the rest are available through the streaming service.
Mike Tolkin’s Eagles lost to Samoa 25-16, despite tries from captain Chris Wyles and the reserve prop Chris Baumann. The loss puts the Eagles at a disadvantage in Pool B, the section which saw Japan’s monumentally shocking victory over South Africa on Saturday at the same Brighton stadium.
“We deeply regret this unavoidable inconvenience to our fans and customers,” Philbin said, “as we know how passionate they are about watching the Rugby World Cup.”
Later on Sunday, Philbin said the livestream service had been restored, and added: “We are automatically providing our subscribers with refunds and are in the process of communicating this update to them now via social media as well as emailing them directly.”
Philbin said refunds would be made to “all subscribers to today’s matches, including those who made single-game purchases and the all-tournament package”; customers who subscribed for the whole tournament would receive $15 refunds.
Subsequent to the USA game, Wales against Uruguay and world champions New Zealand against Argentina were streamed at universalsports.com for free with the pay-per-view website, rwc2015ppv.com, redirecting.
During the New Zealand versus Argentina game, the streaming appeared jerky and continually stopped – signs of a heavily used stream.
“While the circumstances for the outage were beyond our control,” Philbin said, “we deeply regret the disruption of service to viewers.”
(The Guardian)
