ESPN’s fantasy football site isn’t working on the most important day of the season

Update: Service has been restored and ESPN provided us with the following statement:

“ESPN Fantasy is restored and we will continue to monitor. We identified a backend data access issue and resolved as quickly as possible. The issue did not impact data for teams, leagues or rosters. We sincerely apologize to all ESPN fantasy users.”

As if the rising popularity of daily fantasy sports sites aren’t giving ESPN enough to worry about this season, the fantasy sports provider’s platform has been down all day.

Today around 1pm ET / 10am PT (which is when the first round of NFL games started) ESPN’s fantasy sports platform crashed and became unreachable on the web and in their mobile app.

ESPN confirmed the outage on their Twitter about an hour after kickoff at 11am PT, and as of now (more than 4 hours later) it is still down. While ESPN’s fantasy home page is up, as soon as you click to view your league or draft a new team the site won’t load, with your browser saying that the server dropped the connection. The app is just displaying a blank page, saying that “there was an error while trying to reach Fantasy Football”.

Since today is basically a holiday for die hard fantasy sports fans, the outage hasn’t been well received. Fans typically check their fantasy team and scores every few minutes on Sunday (especially on the first day of the season), and now they have no idea how their teams are doing.

Even Claire McCaskill, the senior U.S senator from Missouri tweeted about how disappointed she is with the outage.

While normally customers would just head to a competitor when a service goes down, ESPN’s fantasy players are essentially locked into the platform all season since they’ve already drafted teams and joined season-long leagues.

Updated to reflect that ESPN stopped offering paid leagues last year.