Tech
FIFA World Cup 2022

World Cup broadcaster FuboTV was cyber attacked at the absolute worst time

Yikes.
By Tim Marcin  on 
morocco player laying on grass in world cup and screenshot of tweet about fubotv being down
Not a good time to go down. Credit: Ercin Erturk / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Screenshot: Twitter / @franklinleonard

FuboTV, which streams the World Cup, was the victim of a cyber attack at the exact worst time: during the World Cup semifinal match between France and Morocco on Wednesday.

FuboTV said in a statement Thursday that customers had trouble accessing their accounts during the game, noting that it wasn't a bandwidth problem, but rather "a criminal cyber attack."

"FuboTV takes this matter very seriously," the company said. "Once we detected the attack, we immediately took steps to contain the incident and worked to restore service to all of our users as quickly as possible. Service was fully restored by last evening. We deeply regret the disruption caused by this incident in the meantime."

People online were seriously displeased when the service crashed. The World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world and the streamer crashed during a crucial, exciting match. FuboTV is often the only streaming option for soccer matches in the U.S. in particular, meaning some folks likely got the service just for the World Cup.

As you can imagine, people took to Twitter on Wednesday to vent their anger about the outage on match day:

"We have reported the incident to law enforcement and have engaged Mandiant, an industry-leading incident response firm, to assist with our continuing investigation and response," FuboTV said. "Our primary focus currently is on ensuring that the incident is fully contained and that there is no threat of further disruption for any of our customers."

Of course, ensuring the incident is a one-off doesn't mean anything to people who weren't able to watch the game on Wednesday. Once the game is played, the game is played. It's over and done.

France ended up winning on Wednesday, meaning they'll now square off with Argentina in the final on Sunday. That means FuboTV will have one last shot at redemption.

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Tim Marcin

Tim Marcin is a culture reporter at Mashable, where he writes about food, fitness, weird stuff on the internet, and, well, just about anything else. You can find him posting endlessly about Buffalo wings on Twitter at @timmarcin.


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