The Patriots sideline “digital assistants” impacted by issue

Jan 25, 2016 07:17 GMT  ·  By
Microsoft signed an agreement with the NFL to provide teams with Surface tablets
   Microsoft signed an agreement with the NFL to provide teams with Surface tablets

Microsoft’s putting a lot of effort and money into the Surface lineup, but every once in a while, the device makes the headlines due to the issues that some people experience with it. And in most of these cases, it’s the NFL teams that can’t get the Surface to work right.

The latest such blunder took place this weekend in the NFL championship game between the Patriots and Broncos, when the Surface tablets used by the New England team stopped working all of a sudden.

For background, Microsoft has its very own agreement with NFL to supply teams with Surface tablets that can be used during games to analyze opposition and look into stats, and all devices are locked down to make sure that everyone uses them right. But in the case of the tablets provided to the Patriots, there was some sort of issue that completely crashed them, the CBS commentator explained.

"They're having some trouble with their Microsoft Surface tablets - on the last defensive possession the Patriots' coaches did not have access to those tablets to show pictures to their players. NFL officials have been working at it. Some of those tablets are back in use, but not all of them. A lot of frustration that they didn't have them on that last possession,” he said, according to Verge.

Just network issues

What exactly happened is that the Surface tablets used by the Patriots lost their network connection, so the issue didn’t necessarily impact the devices themselves. Sure, everyone at the game actually blamed Microsoft and its tablets, but Redmond still hopes that everyone would eventually become aware that it wasn’t at fault for this issue.

“Our team on the field has confirmed the issue was not related to the tablets themselves but rather an issue with the network. We worked with our partners who manage the network to ensure the issue was resolved quickly,” Redmond said.

On the bright side, now everyone knows that the NFL uses Microsoft’s Surface tablets, so nobody would ever call them iPads anymore.

Update: title updated to better reflect that the Surface tablets experienced a network issue and the crash wasn't caused by the devices themselves. Thanks everyone for sending this in!