On Wednesday, as football fans from around the world were watching defending champion France beat Morocco in the World Cup semifinals, customers of sports-centric live TV streaming service fuboTV experienced a service interruption at the most inopportune time. However, unlike YouTube TV’s disruption during the 2018 World Cup semifinals, this was not a streaming or bandwidth issue, instead, Fubo is saying that it was the target of a cyber attack.
“On December 14, 2022, the day of the Qatar 2022 semifinal match between France and Morocco, many FuboTV customers experienced issues accessing their accounts,” the company said. “The incident was not related to any bandwidth constraints on Fubo’s part. We were instead the target of a criminal cyber attack.”
Once detected, Fubo says that it took steps to mitigate the impact of the attack and was able to restore service to all affected customers by Wednesday evening. The company did not indicate whether any subscriber data was at risk due to the attack, but it has been in touch with law enforcement about the incident.
“The entire FuboTV team is absolutely dedicated to delivering an exceptional experience while protecting customer data,” the company said in a statement on Thursday. “Our primary focus currently is on ensuring that the incident is fully contained and that there is no threat of further disruption for any of our customers.”
In addition, the streamer has contracted industry-leading incident response firm Mandiant to assist with the investigation and response. Fubo has promised to maintain transparency throughout the process and will provide updates as more information becomes available.
“We appreciate the trust our customers have in us and the opportunity to serve them everyday,” Fubo said. “We assure you that we are working diligently with our outside cybersecurity experts to take all appropriate steps to remediate this incident and to prevent any similar incident from recurring in the future.”
Fubo
Fubo is a live TV streaming service with about 90 top channels that start at $79.99 per month. This plan includes local channels, 25 of the top 35 cable channels, and regional sports networks (RSNs). In total, you should expect to pay about $91.99 per month, after adding in their RSN Fee. Fubo was previously known as “fuboTV.”