By Ben Sieck on

Millions of fantasy football players were left in the dark shortly after the early NFL games kicked off on Sunday thanks to a system wide crash of ESPN’s fantasy site. Players trying to view their teams, make lineup changes, track stats, and check the scores of their match ups were unable to do so for much of Sunday’s opening action.

The site seems to have bounced back for now, but for a few hours fantasy players were left in the dark ages — they actually had to track their players’ stat lines themselves. As you can imagine, players were not shy about taking to social media to express their displeasure with ESPN’s service as they impatiently waited to access their teams. Even a sitting U.S. Senator voiced her concerns.

ESPN acknowledged the problem around 2 p.m. EST, but for many players it was already too late.

The outage extended from the mobile fantasy app to the online site itself. Even ESPN’s fantasy baseball service was briefly inactive on Sunday.

If our Twitter poll is any indication, ESPN is the preferred fantasy provider for approximately 43 percent of players. In October of last year, the company said it had 7.1 million unique users of its fantasy football app, and that number has surely grown since then.

Service resumed in a limited capacity around 4 p.m. EST, right in time for the late afternoon slate of games, but ESPN did not give the all clear until 6:33 p.m.

If you lost this weekend’s match up, don’t worry you weren’t alone. ESPN also started the season 0-1.

[CNBC/Photo: ESPN]

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About Ben Sieck

Ben is a recent graduate of Butler University where he served as Managing Editor and Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Butler Collegian. He currently resides in Indianapolis.

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