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Week 10 Fantasy FAQ

Yahoo! Fantasy Players:

As we've noted in a lot of our communications to you, we are incredibly apologetic for our outage this past Sunday – we know the impact this had on your teams and your day. To provide more detail on what happened and how we're handling, we wanted to set up this FAQ to answer some of the questions we know you have. Thanks again for your patience and playing with us.

— The Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Staff

Q. Why were players unable to access Yahoo! Fantasy sports on November 11th?
A. We have giant machines called "filers" that store all of the data about your teams and leagues.  These filers serve millions of files every hour for our games, and normally our machines can handle this with no problem. Recently, we discovered a hardware issue in one of the filers that caused the other one to overload.  We replaced some hardware, re-configured the setup, and did some testing.  However this Sunday – at approximately 12:15 pm ET – the new configuration failed.  This created an overload on storage capacity and took the Fantasy part of our site down. 

We had dozens of engineers from Yahoo! and our storage vendor working together to determine the cause and fix it.  Over the course of the morning and early afternoon, we repeatedly thought we were close to a solution, but the problem persisted. After multiple attempts, we decided to move our mobile apps to a back-up data center to get the web version of the game back up and get the mobile apps up in a "read-only" state – meaning you could see scores and data, but not edit lineups or post to message boards. By Monday afternoon, after a thorough system stress test, we moved mobile apps back to a fully functional state in the original datacenter in time for Monday Night Football.

Q. What fantasy sports are in season?

A. Football, Basketball, Pro Football Pick’em, Salary Cap Football, Survival Football, College Football Pick’em, Auto Racing, and Salary Cap Soccer.

Q. What is the effect on Week 10 for Fantasy Football?

A. In private leagues, the Commissioner can decide whether to let the results stand, change rosters after the fact, or vacate the week. If the Commissioner chooses to vacate the week, there will be tools within the game to help facilitate the process.

For public leagues, results will stand as they are currently. We evaluated several options and, while we know that there will be users for which this is still problematic, we determined that this was the best option with likely the least impact to the least users.

Q. What is the effect on Week 2 for Fantasy Basketball?
A. In private leagues and public leagues, results will stand as they are currently. We evaluated several options and, while we know that there will be users for which this is still problematic, we determined that this was the best option with likely the least impact to the least users.

Q. What is the status of the Fantasy Football mobile app?

A. As of Monday, November 12th, the mobile apps are fully functional.

Q. I missed the pick deadline in Pro Football Pick’em - what are my options?

A. Commissioners for private groups can choose to edit the group settings to drop an extra week of lowest scores.

For public groups, results will stand as they are currently. We evaluated several options and, while we know that there will be users for which this is still problematic, we determined that this was the best option with likely the least impact to the least users.

Q. What is the effect on Week 10 for Salary Cap Football and Survival Football?
A. Results will stand. In the future, we plan on incorporating commissioner tools to edit group member picks after the deadline.

Q. What is Yahoo! doing to prevent another outage in the future?
A. We are performing an extensive investigation of what caused the outage internally and with our storage vendor to ensure that we have the right infrastructure in place to prevent another outage.

Q. As a fantasy user, what else should I be aware of?
A. As a token of our appreciation for your patience and continued support, we are providing all Fantasy Football users with free weekly Scouting Reports. The weekly report includes expert analysis, rankings, and news, and is accessible via the Research tab in your league.

We are also offering all fantasy users a 20% discount on any purchase at the Yahoo! Sports Store through December 31, 2012. Find more details on the discount here.

Q. Where can I find real-time updates?
A. We will share updates on @YahooSports and facebook.com/yahoosports.