As the 2025 Opening Day approached, the league's official streaming platform, MLB TV, experienced a major outage across the United States. When fans tried to access the platform ahead of the scheduled start of the games, they were unable to enter the platform and faced a "Playback Error" message. Thousands of baseball fans across the country experienced a similar problem and took to social media to express their confusion and disappointment.
The platform Down Detector, which tracks such outages based on reports from users, reported on Thursday that more than 22,000 fans were unable to access the platform. Following the outage, Down Detector released more information, revealing that 71% of users faced an outage on the MLB TV app, while 25% reported a problem with the website and 4% were not even able to log in to the platform.
As of now, the exact reason behind the outage on Opening Day remains unclear. It could have been caused by anything from server problems to human error.
Trending
When fans reported the problem to the MLB Fan Support, they got a reply stating:
"Thank you for letting us know. We are investigating this now and expect a resolution shortly. We apologize for any delay."
Despite the response from Fan Support, many fans were unable to watch their teams on the Opening Day of the season, leading to huge disappointment. Following the outage, the league's Fan Support apologized to users individually for the inconvenience.
MLB marks highest Opening Day average attendance since 2017
Despite the trouble faced by baseball fans trying the stream games through MLB TV on Thursday, the league recorded its highest Opening Day average attendance since 2017. There were 14 games played on Thursday, which reportedly brought together a total of 42,345 fans to baseball stadiums across the country.
Among the 14 games played on Opening Day, the LA Dodgers versus Detroit Tigers game at Dodger Stadium attracted the highest crowd with 53,595 fans. Following in a close second was the Chicago Cubs versus Arizona Diamondbacks game at Chase Field, where 49,070 fans attended. Rounding up the top three was the Minnesota Twins versus St. Louis Cardinals game at Busch Stadium, which recorded 47,395 fans.
