Just after 11 a.m. CT Sunday, Nov. 11, I went to the Yahoo! Fantasy Football page to double-check my line-up for any injuries, as I and many others always do. To my surprise, the page didn’t load, and wouldn’t load after many retries. I even tried my mobile app, but that didn’t work either, so I gave up in frustration.
Ken Fuchs, head of Yahoo! Sports, apologized the next day in an email sent to all users. I thought it was well-written: he owned up to the mistake, identified correctly the victims (fantasy football players, NOT Yahoo), didn’t say anything contradictory (e.g. “our servers never fail”) and aligned himself with the victims (“as a Yahoo! Sports fantasy player myself …”).
Two days later, Ken sent another email detailing the problem (new configuration of hardware failed) and offering some compensation (free access to the “Scouting Report” and 20 percent discount to Yahoo! Sports Store).
I was fortunate that the outage didn’t affect me, though I can see how angry some people would be if they didn’t get to set their line-ups prior to the outage. The compensation can’t make up for a lost game, but it can move Yahoo! slowly back in the public’s trust.
My only disappointment was that Yahoo! waited until Monday to say anything. Even some kind of note on Sunday acknowledging that the site was down and was being worked on would have been helpful.
Still, kudos to Yahoo! for how it handled a very tough situation.