As sports fans around the world tuned into the World Cup semifinals on July 10, 2018, many were unpleasantly surprised to discover that the popular streaming service FuboTV was not allowing access.
FuboTV was not just any ordinary streaming service, but the exclusive streaming provider of the games in the United States, giving users access to all the World Cup games. With FuboTV being the only one available, millions of people were now left unable to view their favorite teams.
FuboTV users began taking to Twitter and other social media to voice their complaints and ask for an explanation for why their service wasn’t working. FuboTV eventually responded publicly that the technical difficulties were due to a “criminal cyber attack targeting our service.”
The company followed this up with an apology on its web site and app, along with an explanation of what had happened. According to FuboTV, an attacker had tried to take advantage of the high traffic coming in on a World Cup night to target their system, and the attack resulted in a number of service interruptions.
Although the outage lasted for only about an hour, it was long enough to frustrate many customers who had been planning to watch their team compete in the important match.
FuboTV is currently taking legal action against the attacker, and has also been working on additional server and streaming capacity to prevent a similar attack in the future.
In the meantime, while FuboTV users may be angry at the service interruption, they can at least take solace in the fact that their favorite teams are still in the hunt for the World Cup trophy.