ESPN Plus says it will issue partial refunds to customers who paid for a UFC pay-per-view event on Saturday just to find technical problems.
Conor McGregor vs. Dustin Poirier made the headline for UFC 257’s main card, which was scheduled to start at around 10 pm ET on Saturday. To watch, ESPN Plus subscribers, who pay $ 59.99 a year for the streaming service, also pay $ 69.99 for Saturday’s event. But users in the United States began reporting a blackout on the ESPN Plus app on Saturday night, which lasted for some of the previous fights on the main card.
A spokesman for Disney, owner of ESPN, said in an email to The Verge on Sunday, that the company was “aware that a technical issue prevented some users from accessing the initial part of the ESPN + pay-per-view event, and we apologize for that experience. We work as quickly as possible to identify and resolve the issue. ”
The spokesman did not say what the specific problem was, but it affected some users in the western United States and was resolved at 11 pm ET, according to the company, in time to see the fights. of signatures. Users were affected between a few minutes and more than an hour.
The company says it will provide partial refunds to users affected by the outage. Customers who have paid for the fight through a third-party platform, such as Apple, Roku, Google or Amazon, will need to request a refund from the platform, but Disney / ESPN says it will work with these companies in the refund process.