BBC iPlayer Crashes During England Quarter Final Win
Last Saturday saw what was probably one of the biggest TV and sports events in the UK for nearly 30 years. England, for the first time in 28 years, reached the semi-final of a World Cup. It was an event which has brought interest and excitement to many people, including those who are not usually fans of football or indeed the England national team.
With the BBC iPlayer streaming the match live though, it seems that a significant number of people had a major problem. In a report via SkyNews, the license paid service crashed for many users just as the game entered injury time.
Don’t Crash Now!
Now, the crash did admittedly occur in injury time and as such you might be wondering what’s the big deal. Well, you only had to see England prior match against Columbia or indeed Russia and Croatia to see just how much can change during those final minutes. As such, many users are clearly exceptionally angry that the BBC had this failure at a highly critical juncture.
It is now known how many people this issue affected. Based on outage reports though, it is known that at least 1500 people were affected and likely several thousand more. This does, of course though, raise the concern about the upcoming semi-final against Croatia on Wednesday. I somehow doubt that those affected are going to have a lot of faith moving forward.
Some Mitigating Circumstances
Being such a major footballing event, the match itself produced some of the highest viewing figures seen on UK TV for several years. As such, the service was probably seeing some of the heaviest traffic loads ever recorded as well. This particularly since the BBC also offers 4K streaming via the service which gobbles up a lot more bandwidth.
The BBC has apologised for the incident, however, as of yet has given no reason for it. If you are looking to watch the match on Wednesday though, my recommendation would be to just find a standard TV service. You’re not, after all, going to want to miss this!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
