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FuboTV reports that the World Cup streaming interruption was caused by cyberattack
FuboTV confirmed to FuboTV that the cyberattack caused a streaming interruption that prevented subscribers from viewing the World Cup Qatar 2022 semi-final match between France and Morocco.
FuboTV subscribers discovered that the streaming site was not available at 2:45 ET as they were about to start watching the World Cup semi-final.
They were instead greeted by a CB_ERR_OPEN message, which stated “ff downstream not available” when they tried to log in.
Error message shown on FuboTV when attempting to login
Source:
Customers could not reach support for the issue as they must first log into FuboTV. This is impossible.
FuboTV quickly tweeted about the problem and suggested that subscribers stream it through FOX.
We apologize to all customers experiencing problems with France vs Morocco. This issue is being addressed. You can also stream the game on FOX for free,” FuboTV’s Twitter account.
FuboTV subscribers took to Twitter complaining about the outage, and that they couldn’t watch the game.
Cyberattacks cause outage
FuboTV today confirmed that the cyberattack caused the outage. They are still investigating and responding to the incident.
“On the 14th of December 2022, day of the Qatar 2022(tm), semifinal match between France & Morocco, many FuboTV subscribers experienced problems accessing their accounts,” published to FuboTV’s website.
Fubo did not have bandwidth limitations, so the incident wasn’t related. Instead, we were the victim of a cyberattack by criminals.”
According to the statement, once the attackers were identified, the team worked diligently to restore subscribers’ service and was able to do this in the late evening.
FuboTV claims that Mandiant, a cybersecurity company, was contacted to investigate the attack. They also reported it to law enforcement.
FuboTV did not provide any information on the attack, but stated that there was no outage due to a shortage of bandwidth. This indicates that it wasn’t a distributed-denial-of service (DDoS).
Mandiant was notified that the attackers were likely to have breached their servers or network. This type of breach usually results in the immediate shut down of IT services to stop the attack.
Cyberattacks often cause disruption for days or even weeks while the attacker is being investigated and devices are restored.
FuboTV however was able recover its services within a short time.
BleepingComputer reached FuboTV to ask about the cyberattack. They referred us to the original statement, and promised an update when they had more information.