If you were one of the people left wondering what was going on during the first hour of the Rose Bowl while the WatchESPN app wasn’t working, you weren’t alone. ESPN is now blaming what it calls a “technical issue” with its servers for the streaming outage, which lasted at least an hour for some folks and persisted longer than that into the college playoff game for others.

“A technical issue relating to servers” is the reason ESPN’s spokesman gave the Associated Press for whatever it was that caused yesterday’s streaming coverage blackout.

That meant anyone trying to watch the game on tablets and computers were left staring at an error message for around the first hour of the stream, with other viewers saying they had problems for “a while longer” than that, the spokesman confirmed.

ESPN said today that it “will be working to prevent a recurrence in the future,” while your father-in-law is still cursing over the hour of his life that he will never get back.

Server problems shut down ESPN’s Rose Bowl stream [Associated Press]

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