ESPN’s ‘Get Up’ Forced to Do Show Without Graphics Due to Global Tech Outage — Uses Whiteboard for Segment

The crew of ESPN’s Get Up had to adapt on the fly Friday thanks to an global IT outage that disrupted a wide variety of services.

Early Friday morning, many services were offline due to the effects of the hours-long outage. The issue reportedly stemmed from a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike , which affected Microsoft customers as a result. This led to several major airlines grounding flights in addition to the litany of technical issues elsewhere.

By 8 a.m. — when Get Up came on — ESPN was still reeling from the effects of the outage. Host Mike Greenberg opened Get Up saying that the show would look different, explaining how technical difficulties have taken away their ability to use graphics.

Just before the end of the first hour, viewers got to see just how big of a deal that was during the trivia segment “Sneaky Hembo.” The segment usually has one of the show’s guests try to answer a trivia question formulated by producer Paul Hembekides , with the question displayed on a big screen in the studio. On Friday, however, that big screen was unavailable and they wrote the trivia question on a whiteboard.

“We are back on a very unique day, in which we are making due as best we can here,” Greenberg said before introducing the segment, “without a lot of our usual graphics.”

Despite the unorthodox nature of it all, the Get Up desk treated it like a regular Friday. When insider Dan Graziano got the question right, the whiteboard was flipped upside-down to reveal the answer on the other side. Included was a printed photo of the former LSU quarterback Y.A. Tittle .

Watch above via ESPN.