Here’s what to do about your Mayweather-McGregor live stream not working

For the millions of people who spent $99.99 a pop to watch the hyped bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor on pay-per-view Saturday night, they would love to be able to actually watch the fight. Unfortunately, plenty of fans are having trouble accessing the broadcast with the main event closing in.

It appears the issues are plaguing both Showtime and the UFC, which are streaming the fight on their websites and mobile platforms. Fans unsurprisingly have began lashing out on social media about their inability to watch an event they spent a bunch of money on.

Missing out on the fight would be a massive disappointment for a lot of people, so we’re here to offer some suggestions to get your party back on track. Most of these issues will be on the broadcasters’ end, and there’s only so much you can do about their servers being overwhelmed.

But with Mayweather vs. McGregor set to start soon, here are some tips.

Did you order the fight from Showtime or UFC? And if it’s the former, did you order it through a cable or satellite service provider? For example, if you ordered it through Comcast, you can only watch it through your set-top box without access to a live stream. Double check how you ordered the fight, and make sure you’re looking in the right place to access it.

Cable companies used random channels for pay-per-view broadcasts, so it can be tricky figuring out which one is carrying the fight. They probably sent a confirmation email to you with this information when you completed your order. If it’s on channel 764, make sure you’re there and not ripping your hair out watching a blank screen on channel 664.

Sometimes the internet can be wonky. It’s worth trying to reload the stream to see if it’ll go through, as there are surely people across a number of channels trying to solve these problems right now. If you tried streaming off an Xbox, then give it a shot on a laptop. Or hey, maybe it was just your crappy router.

According to ESPN, they’ve delayed the beginning of the main draw in order to try to resolve the pay-per-view issues. So yes, they’re aware of all the upset fans right now, and it seems like they’re doing as much as possible to fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time.

You’d think they would’ve been ready for this with so much time to plan in advance, but the fight is clearly proving to be quite popular with a lot of last-minute PPV purchases.

If all else fails, you shouldn’t have to pay for an event you couldn’t access due to poor service. Several cable companies offered refunds in 2015 when there were issues during the pay-per-view for Mayweather’s fight against Manny Pacquiao, so there’s precedent for being able to at least get your money back. Sure, you’d probably rather just be able to watch the fight live in that crisp, crisp HD like you’d paid for, but at least you can make sure you’re not paying that cash for nothing.

There will be millions of fans following the action on social media, and we’ll be posting live updates for the entirety of the fight here at SB Nation. If there’s a knockout right at the start of the fight, it’ll spread like wildfire through tweets and Facebook posts anyway. Just because you can’t access the very expensive live stream you paid for (and hopefully got refunded) doesn’t mean you should give up and watch some Seinfeld reruns for the rest of the night.