MLS Season Pass down on big night due to Apple TV outage

Apple TV suffered a major outage on Saturday night that prevented consumers from watching programming on Apple devices. In particular, the Apple TV outage resulted in MLS Season Pass being down for approximately two hours on a big night for MLS fans.

The timing couldn’t be any worse. Viewers on Apple devices missed the entirety of the first half between Portland Timbers against Seattle Sounders. In addition to missing most of that game, viewers also missed the first half of San Jose against Kansas City.

With Apple streaming 100% of MLS games for the next 10 years, and reports of slow adoption of MLS Season Pass, MLS and Apple don’t need embarrassing tech issues getting in the way of fans watching games.

Timeline of Apple TV outage

The culprit for the downtime wasn’t just the Apple TV app. In fact, all Apple services were down including Apple Music, Apple iCloud, App Store, Apple TV+ and iTunes.

Reports started coming in that the Apple TV app was not working around 9:40PM ET. Downdetector continued reporting that all of the Apple services were down until around 11:20PM ET.

The Apple TV downtime coincided with viewers missing Alexi Lalas’ guest appearance on MLS 360, so at least there was a ray of light.

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No communication with subscribers is unacceptable

So when Apple has a major outage like this, it’s imperative that the league and Apple communicate with MLS Season Pass subscribers to let them know what’s going on.

However, both MLS and Apple were silent on the issue. Neither of them communicated the issue on their websites nor social media channels. As a result, viewers were left completely in the dark.

Some of the frustrated subscribers turned to social media to try to find answers. Only then did a minority of them discover that there was a workaround to fix the issue. Users could simply bypass the Apple TV app by logging in through a Google Chrome browser to watch the coverage on tv.apple.com.

The fact that this wasn’t communicated through the official MLS and Apple social media channels is unacceptable. Customers who paid $99 per season (or $14.99 per month) for MLS Season Pass deserve better.