FuboTV has confirmed that the outage that prevented subscribers from watching the semi-final of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 between France and Morocco was caused by a cyberattack.
As users prepared to watch the World Cup semi-final, FuboTV subscribers found that they were unable to connect to the streaming service.
Instead, what they saw was a CB_ERR_OPEN error, which read “ff: downstream not available”.
See also: FBI: Seizes 48 domains related to DDoS attacks
Subscribers were unable to contact support to report the issue, as it required the user to first log in to the FuboTV website, which was not possible.
However, FuboTV soon tweeted that it was working on the issue and advised subscribers to watch the game via FOX.
“We apologize to customers experiencing issues with the France vs. Morocco game. We are addressing the issue. Please note that you can watch this game live on FOX for free,” tweeted .
The outage led to a flood of tweets from FuboTV subscribers complaining about the outage and how they were unable to watch the game.
Outage due to cyberattack
“On December 14, 2022, the day of the Qatar 2022 semi-final match between France and Morocco, many FuboTV customers experienced issues accessing their accounts,” according to a statement posted on FuboTV’s website.
FuboTV confirmed that the cause of the stream outage was a cyberattack and that they are continuing to investigate what happened.
“The incident was not related to bandwidth restrictions on FuboTV’s part. Instead, we were the target of a criminal cyberattack.”
The company goes on to say that once they discovered the attack, they were working to restore service to subscribers, which they were able to do within a few hours.
FuboTV also says that it worked with cybersecurity firm Mandiant to investigate and get answers about the attack and reported the incident to the authorities.
See also: Revue: Twitter closes newsletter platform
FuboTV did not provide details about the attack, but said that a lack of bandwidth did not cause the outage, indicating that it was not a DDoS attack.
While working with Mandiant, they discovered that the attack was likely a breach of their network or servers . These types of breaches usually result in immediate shutdown of IT services to contain the attack.
Cyberattacks can cause long-lasting problems, but FuboTV was able to restore its services in a relatively short period of time.
Source: bleepingcomputer.com
