“Soccer” was brought to a halt on the latest weekend when subscribers of the MLS Season Pass were struck with a series of glitches causing interruptions in their watching experience.
It has been a couple of months since the launch of Apple’s newest venture, the MLS Season Pass. The brand-new subscription-based streaming service is available on the Apple TV and so far has been a hit among MLS enthusiasts.
The streaming service costs $13/month or $79 per season for the subscribers of Apple TV+. Regular users who do not pay for an Apple TV subscription will have to splash out $15 per month or $99 per season for the same service. Season ticket holders of MLS receive the MLS Season Pass for free.
Over the course of two months, fans have seemingly enjoyed the brand-new centralized streaming service which lets viewers enjoy every MLS fixture along with studio productions.
The last weekend, however, a major system affair in the Apple TV app caused a major nuisance in the viewing experience of fans.
The glitch in question came to existence amidst some of the major MLS fixtures as the application kicked the subscribers out of the MLS Season Pass section. In a strange turn of events, the Apple TV app ceased recognizing the subscription of already subscribed users, demanding them to purchase the subscription yet again.
The system error caused a major interruption for the fans who were looking forward to enjoying the Major League Soccer experience. The “blackout” lasted well over an hour.
The outage was particularly frustrating as consumers of the streaming service ended up missing the entirety of the matchup between Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers. In addition, users also missed out on the first-half action from the clash between San Jose and Kansas City.
However, the downtime wasn’t limited to Apple TV+. As a matter of fact, all Apple services including Apple iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Store, and iTunes were down between 9:40 PM ET and 11:20 PM ET.
Most annoyingly, neither Apple nor the MLS publicly addressed the blackout, leaving the viewers completely dark and confused about the situation.
The frustrated viewers turned to social media to address their annoyance over the technical faults the fans had to bear. This resulted in a public outrage over Twitter, with many subscribers demanding a refund from Apple.
MLS season pass, @Apple@AppleTV so glad to be paying for a game I can’t watch due to your system being down. Season pass subscribers deserve a refund for this. @stlCITYsc
Given their reputation as tech giants, such poor display of technical errors and the lack of communication only piles up negativity among the fans in regards to Apple’s reputation.
The fresh acquisition by Apple is going to last a decade, and outages like the one mentioned a couple of months into the brand-new service will only account for the streaming service losing subscribers early on. We’re hopeful of this not be a frequent sight in the MLS Season Pass.
