The official phone app and website used by millions of New York City Marathon fans to follow and support runners suffered repeated outages and crashes Sunday, just as a record 60,000 participants took to the course.
Fans attempting to track loved ones—whether from the sidelines or from miles away—were met with error pages and system-failure alerts.
New York Road Runners, the organization behind the app, acknowledged the disruption after an angry post on X called the breakdown a “total embarrassment for you guys and an insult to the 2m+ spectators relying on your tools to track their loved ones.”
“We are working on this,” NYRR replied on X.
The organization directed users to an alternative live-results page, saying, “In the meantime, you can track runners here.” That page remained operational.
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The technical problems quickly prompted frustrated fans to criticize the app and website across social media.
“How can you be this horrible at customer experience on your most critical day of the year? Haven’t you done this before?” one X user wrote.
A Reddit user also pointed to a recurring problem, writing, “They had the same issue last year too.
“At what point do you not realize you need more hosting capacity when the race is coming up? It should have been obvious it would happen again.”
When functioning normally, the app gives spectators access to split times and real-time location updates for their chosen runners, who wear tracking devices while making their way through New York City’s five boroughs.