The latest site to suffer an outage: ESPN.com, whose Fantasy Sports server has been down since at least Sunday. That's not good news for the tens of thousands of players who pay up to $29.95 per team -- and not with baseball interest at a peak heading into Tuesday night's All-Star game in Boston.
Online fantasy sports, where participants draft "teams" based on real-life players, then track the success of their team based on real-life statistics, comprise a significant revenue stream for online sports sites. And baseball represents the most popular of such sports.
ESPN.com's Fantasy Sports site posted a notice saying that the site was down for necessary maintenance. On Monday, it was changed to state simply: "Fantasy Baseball is currently unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and will restore it as soon as possible."
ESPN.com is a unit of Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS). Its outage troubles come as Disney is solidifying its hold on Infoseek (Nasdaq:SEEK). (See Disney absorbs Infoseek.)
Service regularly strikes out
One user, Michael Lorenzo, told ZDNN that he was upset that the service had gone down with little to no explanation from ESPN.com.
"They didn't warn us that they had some kind of scheduled maintenance for the (Major League Baseball) All-Star game (scheduled for tonight)," Lorenzo told ZDNN. "It's often down three to four times a week, but usually only for an hour or so."
Lorenzo said his 10-person league had voted to switch to another fantasy sports site next year.
Lorenzo forwarded a copy of an e-mail from the ESPN fantasy sports administrator that read in part: "We have experienced problems of late, some out of our control, some within, which have rendered the site inaccessible, and for this we are sorry. Problems out of our control include multiple power outages in our area recently, related to changes in our building's infrastructure. These, coupled with a recent database shift/upgrade, have left FLB in its current, temporary state of 'technical flux.' "
ESPN looking into situation
An ESPN.com spokesman would say only that, "We're looking into the situation, and we hope to know more soon."
ESPN.com does not break out numbers on how many people play in its fantasy leagues or how much revenue the leagues generate for the site.
