About a month ago or so, I did a football draft over at SportingNews.com with the fantasy staff there and had a pretty bad experience.

Multiple participants (including me, for most of the draft) couldn’t see by the draft window when it was their turn to pick, multiple service interruptions made the 12-team effort take somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone.

In the early morning hours Thursday, SN.com sent out a message to all fantasy users about the issues with its Draft & Trade Football commissioner game. Here’s the opening paragraph:

As many of you are aware, Sporting News embarked on a massive rebuild of its fantasy games platform a few months ago in an effort to add more features and offer an updated environment. Part of that strategy was to have Sporting News management and personnel work with RotoHog, one of the country’s leading games developers. Despite the best efforts of both parties, the Sporting News Fantasy Football games have been inaccessible or unstable for more days than we feel is acceptable. The latest problem followed what appeared to be a deliberate attempt by someone to undermine the game platform.

The message went on to say that new sign-ups have been frozen until further notice — which could all but seal the customer base for the season-long game now that we’re at the dawn of the NFL regular season — and that those who have paid for teams and leagues will be refunded. Players at the prize-eligible “platinum” level will remain eligible for those prizes.

Salary-cap games Ultimate Fantasy Football and Fantasy Football Challenge appear to be unaffected by the issues with Draft & Trade.

For what it’s worth, I was able to set my lineup Thursday morning without issues for that team from the aforementioned draft.