In January, following the outage at the AFC title game, a Microsoft executive had written that "Microsoft Surfaces have not experienced a single failure in the two years they’ve been used on NFL sidelines."

The January outage was attributed to a network cable malfunction, according to the NFL. 

"The issue was not caused by the tablets or the software that runs on the tablets. We have experienced no issues with the tablets this season. Any issues were network related," the NFL said at the time.