FuboTV Says Outage During World Cup Semifinal Was Due to ‘Criminal Cyberattack’
FuboTV touts itself as “the best streaming service for sports aficionados” — but the TV provider was fubar for most of the day Wednesday, causing many subscribers to miss the World Cup semifinal match between France and Morocco.
On Dec. 14, many FuboTV customers experienced issues accessing their accounts, starting at around 9 a.m. ET and continuing through the evening. According to a company statement released Thursday, the outage “was not related to any bandwidth constraints on Fubo’s part. We were instead the target of a criminal cyberattack.”
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FuboTV said that after it 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.”
In an update at midnight ET, FuboTV’s status page said, “While this ongoing issue has been resolved for some users, we are aware that many users are still unable to access the FuboTV app and website at this time. Our teams remain engaged and will be working into the night to fully resolve this issue.”
The company said it reported the incident to law enforcement agencies and hired Mandiant, a security-incident response firm, to assist in its investigation and response. “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,” FuboTV said.
First launched in 2015 as a soccer-centric livestreaming service, FuboTV operates in the U.S., Canada, Spain and France. In the U.S., it competes with other virtual pay-TV services including YouTube TV, Hulu and Dish’s Sling TV.
FuboTV counted 1.23 million paid subscribers in North America at the end of September 2022, up 31% year over year and a sequential increase from 946,735 in Q2, and 358,000 in the rest of the world (up only slightly from 347,000 in the prior quarter). In Q3, the company’s revenue increased 43% year over year, to $224.8 million, while its net loss of $152.7 million was 44% higher than the year-earlier period.
For 2021, FuboTV generated annual revenue of $638 million, more than double year over year, and posted a net loss of $383 million versus a net loss of $599 million in 2020.
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