by Anura Guruge
on June 27, 2021
On Saturday, June 26, 2021, I clicked on my ESPN channel on my Roku (so that I could logon to ESPN+ to watch the T20I between the West Indies & South Africa). The ESPN channel would NOT LOAD. Got a blue screen similar to that show above. I first thought that the ESPN servers were overloaded given that I knew that there was a lot of soccer taking place in Europe.
Tried a few times on Saturday. No luck. Waited until Sunday … today, i.e., June 27, 2021. Still no joy.
Couldn’t REMOVE the channel. Why? Because I had an ESPN+ subscription. I worked that out. I cancelled the subscription. I knew it was easy enough to reinstate. Bingo. Could remove channel.
Reinstalled channel. Restarted Roku. Nothing. Problem persisted.
Checked the ‘Roku Community‘ forum. Did my own post. Googled the problem. Saw that a number of folks were saying ‘Contact ESPN‘.
I thought it would be impossible to get in touch with ESPN support. I was wrong. I was able to get CHAT support in under a minute. Yes, when through the inevitable preliminaries. Then I told them that I had seen that folks were talking about ‘blocked IP-addresses‘. She agreed that that probably was the problem.
Gave her my IP-address.
She unblocked it. Bingo. I was back in business.
She said that the ESPN engineers weren’t sure why some IP-addresses were getting accidentally blocked — but they were invariably those associated with Roku devices.
So, you now know what to do.
