The CBS March Madness bracket site went down at the worst possible time — and people were furious

Bob Donnan/USA Today Sports/Reuters

On Thursday, CBS Sports learned an important lesson: Do not get between procrastinators and their March Madness brackets.

At around 11 a.m. Thursday, the CBSSports.com site that many use to fill out their brackets went down, likely because it was overloaded with everyone trying to get in their last-second picks. CBS Sports told The New York Post that the “service was down due to overwhelming demand.”

The timing was particularly awful given that the first game started at 12:15 p.m., by which time the site still wasn’t back up.

That means thousands of people got shut out, and they were not pleased. Downdetector saw “CBSSports.com complaints” rise to over 2,000 per 15 minutes, The New York Post reported.

Here’s the graph:

Downdetector.com

In the hours following the outage, an angry hoops-loving mob descended on Twitter to decry the situation.

“@CBSSports absolutely sucks!!” wrote one Twitter user. “Had my bracket all ready to go/submit and the d— server crashed! Now I’m out money and have a blank bracket!”

“@CBSSports your bracket challenge and website have been an absolute nightmare this week. Not to mention today’s crash. Unacceptable,” wrote another.

“@CBSSports That’s no good, I have Notre Dame winning. Oh wait, no I don’t. Because your site was down and I couldn’t enter my bracket,” joked a third.

In fairness to CBS, however, those people’s brackets likely would have been busted already.