The World Triathlon Corporation's website for Live Coverage of this past weekend's Ironman races suffered a major outage that left remote spectators tracking their loved ones or friends in the dark. IronmanLIVE.com was scheduled to have simultaneous live race coverage from Ironman Louisville and Ironman Canada. Remote / Online spectators would be able to see live updates, have access to the athlete tracker and at times see live video coverage.
Both sites were the target of a cyberattack designed to deny users access to the website, which made it difficult for fans to follow the progress of participants at Ford Ironman Louisville and Subaru Ironman Canada. Ironman.com Faced Cyberattack
All was working well in the morning for the start of Ironman Louisville with coverage from Greg Welch and Chris McDonald. During the live coverage, they showed some pre-race video coverage from Lisa Bentley who was up in Penticton, Canada covering Ironman Canada. It appeared that the main video coverage was going to focus on Louisville, since the note below the Ironman Canada video said that video coverage would begin at 11 am local race time. All was going well during the initial hours of the live race coverage.
Some 6 hours into the Ironman Canada race video coverage was showing some TV show from a Canadian TV station. Race updates still showed.
At some point in the late afternoon the site became unreliable and slow. People were unable to access IronmanLIVE.com or Ironman.com The stream of twitter messages started flowing, wondering if there was an issue and reporting their disgust. People around the world became frustrated not being able to track an athlete. RaceHQ reported that the site was reporting a denial-of-service attack, but we have been unable to verify that.
craig42k Aug 29, 4:19pm via SocialScope
Anyone else having trouble loading IronmanLive.com?
ginacrawfordnz Aug 29, 5:05pm via web
I want to watch the ironman coverage, but ironmanlive keeps telling me it's a bad request. It's not a bad request.....
IronmaNash Aug 29, 5:52pm via web
Huge FAIL on #ironmanlive ... unable to handle the double traffic on #IMC and #IMLouisville day.
gohildy Aug 29, 6:26pm via web
Can't believe Ironmanlive.com is down :( So frustrating not being able to track all my friends
RaceHQ Aug 29, 6:33pm via TweetDeck
@noadeutsch ironmanlive.com reporting denial-of-service attack.
AndreeMiceli Aug 29, 8:56pm via web
ironmanlive.com you have hit a new LOW
crobtri Aug 29, 10:35pm via Power Twitter
The #ironmanlive website needs to update their technology to scale! Want to track some friends and can't get access. ARgh!
ZotOConnor Aug 29, 10:53pm via TwInbox
OK Ironman live you have epic fail. Instead of live streaming Ironman canada, you are streaming the emmies on CTV....
The Ironmanlouisville.com website had no information on the outage but the Ironman.ca site did and was providing regular tracking updates via a link on their site for people wanting to see how people were doing. Unfortunately, most people didn't know to go to that site.
Sometime after 10pm CST the sites started to come back to life slowly. It took a little longer but you were able to get to the athlete tracker. About 30 minutes later, the site was almost fully functional. You could see updates, get to the athlete tracker but the video coverage was sporadic. The video coverage the Ironman Canada was showing the TV show Big Brother and then coverage from the 62nd Annual Emmy Awards. We and others tweeted something and after that the button for the video feed on the Ironman Canada website disappeared, strange...
Today all seems to be working well, but no updates on what happened. Yes, today people can see how their loved ones or friends did, but that's old news now. We were tracking two friends, one at each race going for a Kona slot and wanted to see how they were doing.
Today's technology is supposed to bring thing to life and with no news on what was going on it became frustrating for many. It's quite unfortunate to see this type of coverage from an organization that runs these world class events all over the world. Technology is GREAT when things work well and can be your enemy when it fails. We are pretty sure they will get this figured out one way or another...
