YouTube TV Suffers Major Outage During England-Croatia World Cup Match

During the biggest game of the World Cup so far, YouTube TV suffered an unexpected outage during the England-Croatia match. It was the second major outage YouTube TV has experienced during a major sporting event, following an outage during the NBA Eastern Conference Finals between the Cavaliers and Celtics.

The YouTube TV Twitter account updated users saying it was working “ASAP!” on getting service back up while sending its “sincerest apologies” for partly ruining the game for many of its customers, many of whom took to Twitter to vent about missing crucial parts of the game.

Eventually service was re-established and YouTube TV users were able to watch Croatia defeat England in extra time to reach the World Cup final, but the damage was already done. As services like YouTube TV try to pivot themselves as the go-to TV service away from the traditional cable and dish services, outages during the world’s biggest events aren’t the way to go about it.

The outage is something that will weigh on every YouTube TV subscriber’s mind who is planning on watching the World Cup final between France and Croatia on Sunday. As a precaution, subscribers can download the Fox Sports Go mobile app and log in using their YouTube TV credentials as back up should another outage happen.

But that right there eliminates the ease-of-use nature services like YouTube TV offer. Streaming services still have a ways to go before customers can forget about the reservations they have about them.