Floyd Mayweather Jr. defeated Manny Pacquiao Saturday night in what was billed as the “fight of the century,” but the highly anticipated event got off to a rocky start after it had to be delayed following service outages reported by Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications.
The issues appeared to begin shortly before 8 p.m. when both companies tweeted that they were aware of the problems associated with the broadcast of the Pay-Per-View event and were working to fix them.
A number of upset customers who bought the fight took to social media to complain to the cable providers, including singer John Legend who simply tweeted “wtf” and a photo of his television with an outage message at Time Warner.
The broadcast got underway on time, but amid the outages an announcer said the main event would be delayed due to technical issues.
The fight was initially scheduled to begin after 8 p.m. but ended up starting closer to 9 p.m.
Around 10 p.m., the undefeated Mayweather was announced the unanimous winner of the welterweight world championship unification bout, which was fought at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.
The fight went the full 12 rounds.
Meanwhile, it was unclear whether all cable issues were fixed at the time the event started. By the time it was over, neither Time Warner Cable nor Charter Communications stated on Twitter whether the earlier problems had ever been resolved.
Also not immediately known was just how many customers were impacted and how widespread the outage had been.
For Time Warner Cable, this was not the first problem it has had with a high-profile television event. Some Southern California customers were unable to watch parts of the 2014 Super Bowl because of an outage that occurred shortly before halftime of the big game.
The Mayweather-Manny fight had been available for purchase for about $100.
https://twitter.com/CharterCom/status/594695021791674369
https://twitter.com/TWC_Help/status/594692796054835201
