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YouTube TV goes down (again) during World Cup

YouTube TV goes down (again) during World Cup

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Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

YouTube TV experienced a service outage on Wednesday during the World Cup game between Croatia and England, marking the second time in recent months that the app has had problems during a high-profile live event. In May, YouTube TV had a similar service disruption during the NBA Eastern Conference Finals.

Wednesday afternoon, YouTube said it was “working to be up and running again ASAP.” In the meantime, customers were able to stream the World Cup by authenticating with their YouTube TV credentials inside the Fox Sports Go mobile app or website.

Later on Wednesday, YouTube confirmed that YouTube TV was back up and running and apologized for the downtime. “We are so sorry about the service interruption and we understand your frustration,” the company tweeted.

Several of the major internet TV platforms have dealt with outages at the worst possible times for their customers. Simply put, these issues need to stop happening if YouTube TV, Sling TV, Hulu, DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, and the rest want to be seen as viable replacements for traditional cable. Cable and satellite subscribers aren’t suddenly finding themselves unable to watch the World Cup — and this is just the sort of thing that will keep many people from switching, even with the added flexibility and benefits of the streaming TV services that should otherwise be putting them ahead of the old model.

Do better, YouTube. And everyone else.