After Major League Baseball and the MLBPA agreed to a new CBA Thursday, some normalcy started to return to MLB’s website. That website hadn’t had photos of current major-league players or news on them since the owners locked out the players on Dec. 2, but the player headshots returned early Thursday evening. However, something went wrong with the main MLB.com homepage shortly after that: trying to navigate to MLB.com proper led to the 404 error pictured at top for many people (although various team sites, individual news stories, and other areas of the site still worked as direct landing pages):
It should be made public that it took fewer than 10 minutes of baseball being back for us at https://t.co/7aPru2A9xu to overload our own website
— Shanthi (@ssc627) March 11, 2022
https://twitter.com/SuperMaddix64/status/1502075431549288450
Baseball isn't back yet on the https://t.co/Zi2MON1c2z home page. pic.twitter.com/r10OQBP3nb
— Jason Foster (@ByJasonFoster) March 11, 2022
Some funky things going on with the https://t.co/2NRAQ6h1B8 website and team sites right now.
Methinks they're working out the new 162-game schedule. pic.twitter.com/5dNg6A0MgK
— Tony Paul | Detroit News (@TonyPaul1984) March 11, 2022
That last tweet suggesting the schedule is perhaps a part of this makes some sense, as many of the individual teams and MLB itself did put out schedules during this span of time. There was also a presumed giant surge in people just typing in “MLB.com” with the lockout lifted, and maybe especially from those looking for schedule information. (Or from those, as we were, looking for what the first post-lockout story on a current player will be; that still hasn’t happened yet.) And traffic surges are definitely a common cause of website outages.
At any rate, this wasn’t a super long outage. The 404 error proper existed for around 30 minutes, and then “MLB.com” redirected to “MLB.com/news” for another 15 or so, and now MLB.com is back up and running. That’s not bad, and outages do happen, especially when there are a lot of people trying to access something at once. But it is at least somewhat funny to see a 404 error on the main MLB page for half an hour, and perhaps especially with that “Oof! We dropped the ball” text after a lockout that many remain angry with them for.
