FuboTV blames World Cup outage on cyberattack

Some soccer fans may have missed Wednesday’s semi-final between France and Morocco because of a outage. The streaming service that it was not knocked offline due to demand or reaching bandwidth limitations. Instead, it claims to have been the victim of a cyber attack.

At 9:20AM ET on Wednesday, Fubo reported that users may have been unable to log into their account or create a new one. The issue logged some users out of the FuboTV app as well. On its status page, Fubo apologized to those who were having issues while trying to watch the game, and directed them to a free, 60-minute livestream preview on Fox’s website.

“While this ongoing issue has been resolved for some users, we are aware that many users are still unable to access the FuboTV app and website at this time,” a message posted on Fubo’s at midnight reads. “Our teams remain engaged and will be working into the night to fully resolve this issue.” 

Even though Fubo claimed that service was fully restored on Wednesday evening, the status page still said that account creation, password reset requests and streaming functions remained disrupted as of 12:45PM on Thursday. In any case, fingers crossed everything goes more smoothly for Sunday’s World Cup final between Argentina and France.

Fubo said it took steps to contain the attack as soon as it discovered what was going on. It has reported the incident to law enforcement and it brought in third-party cybersecurity experts to look into what happened and how.

“Our investigation is at an early stage, but we are committed to transparency regarding this incident,” Fubo co-founder and CEO David Gandler wrote in a note to users. “We will provide an update at an appropriate time when we have more information to share.”