Plenty of people took to Twitter Thursday just before the NCAA tournament tipped off to complain about being unable to make or modify their brackets on CBSSports.com. Now, we have a sense of just how widespread the problem was. Richard Morgan of The New York Post has a piece discussing how bad the outage to CBS’ site was:
Thousands of fans who waited until the final minutes to fill out their brackets on CBSSports.com were denied their picks.
…The CBS site crashed around 11 a.m. EDT and stayed down for about two hours, according to Downdetector, a service that tracks digital outages.
Considering the tipoff for the first game was at 12:15 p.m., the timing could not have been worse for 11th-hour bracket makers and just-in-time tweakers.
…CBS Sports didn’t exactly man up but said “service was down due to overwhelming demand.”
…Downdetector calculated that “CBSSports.com complaints” spiked to 2,099 every 15 minutes around noon Thursday, from a base of nearly zero an hour before and an hour after the site’s crash.
The latest
- Adam Schefter: Aaron Rodgers’ ‘Lose my number’ text came after the only text he ever sent Rodgers
- Fox announcer Joe Davis cites ‘oppressive Cuban government’ during WBC broadcast on FS1
- Stephen A. Smith on ‘coming’ ESPN cuts: ‘Hell, for all I know, I might be one of them.’
- Jamie Erdahl handles S-bomb from FAU’s Johnell Davis like a pro
Still, thousands of people complaining about being unable to access your site is never a good thing. That’s especially true when that outage comes at a time that could easily have been anticipated as a high-demand period. It will be interesting to see if CBS takes steps to prevent this from recurring around the start of the tournament in future years.