The Italian communications regulator Agcom has begun an investigation after technical problems caused subscribers to miss large parts of the opening weekend of the Serie A football season.
Subscribers were denied access to their accounts and some were even signed out in the middle of matches, causing an angry reaction from fans and politicians alike.
Sports minister Valentina Vezzali wrote on Twitter that she would be calling for an urgent meeting with Agcom and the League to address the “unacceptable inconvenience” to users.
Riscontrato il grave e inaccettabile disagio causato agli utenti per la mancata connessione a #DAZN, sto predisponendo con i miei uffici un tavolo urgente che coinvolga la @SerieA, il @MISE_GOV e l'@AGCOMunica, in modo da affrontare il prima possibile quanto accaduto.
— Valentina Vezzali (@VVezzali) August 15, 2022
DAZN said it would issue subscribers with a partial refund following the “exceptional’ disruption.
Agcom has asked DAZN to issue the compensation quickly and urgently provide an explanation as to what took place.
After disruption during the 2021/22 season DAZN agreed with Agcom to make available a linear channel as one of 11 commitments to the regulator, which also included a joint monitoring unit and the optimisation of the lowest encoding profiles.
In the closed season agreement was reached with Sky who will now distribute DAZN over its platform in Italy in addition to the three matches already sublicenced to the Comcast unit.
DAZN’s problems aren’t restricted to Italy with both Movistar (Telefonica) and Orange forced to apologise to customers in Spain over similar outages.
