Football fans struggled to watch the first NFL Sunday Ticket game of the season due to issues with DirecTV’s website and app. While some users (including myself) reported seeing an error page when trying to access the Sunday Ticket website, others said they couldn’t even sign in.
But that’s not all — users reported a range of other issues, too, with some getting locked out of the stream and receiving an error message that says they’re located in an NFL stadium and can’t watch the stream. It’s unclear what exactly caused the issues with the Sunday Ticket stream, which started several hours leading up to the game and continued throughout the afternoon.
“We’re aware some customers are unable to access NFL Sunday Ticket online or through the app,” DirecTV spokesperson Alisha Laventure said in a statement to The Verge. “Our teams are working to resolve this, but in the meantime, we recommend satellite customers watch on TV.”
As of around 5:20PM ET, DirecTV started replying to some users’ complaints on Twitter, noting the issue has “been resolved” and that users can “return to watching this afternoon’s out of market games.” It appeared users were still having problems after this, however.
To make matters even worse, those who subscribe to the newly-launched NFL Plus subscription (which is supposed to let you watch live in-market games) said the accompanying app wasn’t loading game scores, and many users were also struggling to get their streams to work. Even football fans watching NFL RedZone on Sling TV and YouTube TV weren’t spared from outages. Sling claimed it brought RedZone back online, but noted viewers using a Samsung device released from 2017 to 2019 could still be affected. YouTube didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
As noted by several users, issues like these apparently aren’t uncommon when streaming the game with DirecTV, which has held the rights to Sunday Ticket since 1994. These rights expire at the end of this football season, and several companies, like Google and Apple, are reportedly looking into securing Sunday Ticket. While they may be able to do football fans some justice by (hopefully) providing a more reliable stream, it still won’t solve the wider issue that is sports streaming.
Update September 11th, 5:49PM ET: Updated to add that SlingTV and YouTubeTV also went down during the games. Also added information about DirecTV’s response to customers.
Correction September 12th, 8:09AM ET: A previous version of the article stated that users were receiving an error message that said they had to be located in a stadium in order to watch the stream, when the message actually said that they were located in a stadium and couldn’t watch. We regret the error.
