Those hoping to catch up on the latest sports highlights Friday morning on “SportsCenter” had to settle for alternative ESPN programming.
As the global tech outage wreaked havoc on the world Friday morning, the media giant could not air its flagship program and instead broadcast “Unsportsmanlike” with hosts Courtney Cronin and Freddie Coleman.
“SportsCenter” returned to the airwaves at 2 p.m., while other programs such as “Get Up” and ESPN Radio were not affected by the outage, per a source.
“The Microsoft outage is affecting @SportsCenter’s ability to get on air, so you’re getting @UnSportsESPN with me and @ColemanESPN on @ESPN, ESPN 2 and @ESPNU for at least the next hour,” Cronin tweeted at 6:58 a.m. ET.
At 7:00 a.m., ESPN showed the New York City skyline, before the broadcast pivoted to Cronin and Coleman.
“A Microsoft outage happened around 1 o’clock in the morning Eastern time and Courtney, all hell has broken loose with Microsoft and having pretty much everything shut down until they try to fix this problem,” Coleman joked to those perhaps confused as to why “SportsCenter” wasn’t airing.
Cronin continued: “I thought I was the only one struggling this morning, Freddie, when I woke up, took my shower, did everything I needed to do and was struggling to put my eyelashes on … I’m late for the show and I’m like,’ Oh my gosh, this is the worst start to the morning ever,’ and then I find out that somebody else had a worse start than I did to the morning. So, whoever is grounded right now, if your flight can’t get taken off, at least you’re listening to us on ESPN Radio.”
The issues stemmed from CrowdStrike pushing out a bad software update that affected Microsoft Windows, which many organizations rely upon.
Other sports-related entities encountering issues due to the cyber issue including Sky Sports in the U.K. crashing, James Dolan’s Sphere in Las Vegas running into similar problems and Manchester United’s tickets site crashing with season tickets set to go on sale, per The Daily Mail.
Paris Olympics organizers told Reuters they had accreditation and uniform deliveries problems due to the problems.
“We have activated contingency plans in order to continue operations,” the organising committee said in a statement, as chroncicled by ESPN.
“At this point, the impacts are limited and concern in particular the delivery of uniforms and accreditations.
“Paris 2024’s ticketing systems have been unaffected. The operations around the preparation of venues is continuing normally, and work schedules are not at risk. The torch relay is continuing along its route as normal.”
