Yahoo! Sports Website Outages – Fantasy Football Fans in an Uproar

For some fans, football is serious business. With the advent of the Internet, the excitement of football made its way to the World Wide Web and fantasy football was born. Fantasy Football takes the fun of football, combines it with the excitement of gambling and brings sports fans a new way to enjoy the football season from home. Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football is one of the more popular fantasy football sites. When this Internet giant suffered a website outage this Sunday, football fans became increasingly angry – and with good reason.

It’s Not Just a Fantasy on the Line

In the world of Fantasy Football, Sunday is a big day. On Sundays you get to track your team’s progress in “real time” and there are cash winnings to be had by those who come out on top. However, it seems that Yahoo! has been having problem with their fantasy football site. The site was down almost all day on Sunday, but that isn’t the “big picture” problem. What has Yahoo! customers really up in arms is that the fantasy football site seems to have issues each and every Sunday and Yahoo! doesn’t seem to have any interest in fixing it.

What’s Going On with the Yahoo! Website Outages?

So why is the Yahoo! Fantasy Football site experiencing website outages and performance issues on a regular basis – especially when Sundays roll around? While no one knows for sure (because Yahoo! isn’t communicating), our best guess is that it’s a server issue. Perhaps some of the people at Yahoo! need to read our post about ensuring that your site is capable of handling the traffic it receives. It’s obvious that there is a recurring problem, and Yahoo! customers are becoming increasingly frustrated because of it.

As Twitter member Travis Chinn tweeted, “@YahooSports your Fantasy Football site sucks. How can it be down or very slow every Sunday. The one day it needs to work. Ridiculous.” Other Twitter members were also tweeting their frustrations. Josh Lanham tweeted, “I'd like to thank @YahooSports for being absolutely worthless 2day while their fantasy football site was down the WHOLE day.” Another tweet by a Mr. Leeland Lawrence shows us just how serious website performance can be, stating that Yahoo! would be losing at least one customer due to the issue when he tweeted “@YahooFootball Site down again. I will not be using your site next year. Big disappointment today.”

Lost Customers Mean Lost Profits

The lack of communication on the part of Yahoo! is one thing. The fact that the company doesn’t seem to be taking any measures to correct the ongoing site issues just adds insult to injury for Yahoo! Fantasy Football customers – some of whom actually pay the site for the Pro Leagues service. These customers likely won’t be using Yahoo!’s fantasy football services next year, as evidenced by Leeland Lawrence’s post. This means that Yahoo! will be losing money. After all, lost customers equate to lost profits.

Don’t make the same mistake Yahoo! is making. Ignoring an issue doesn’t make it go away. It actually makes it worse. If your site has performance issues, get to the bottom of them and fix the problem. If your site is experiencing frequent downtime, Alertra will notify you and you can begin to investigate what is causing the downtime so you can put an end to it. Just don’t forget, whatever problems your site may be experiencing, communicate with your customers about it and let them know what you’re doing to correct the issues. Had Yahoo! kept this in mind, they wouldn’t be losing as many customers as they now will be due to the high levels of customer frustration.