The Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor main event Saturday night in Las Vegas was temporarily delayed because of pay-per-view outages across the country before both fighters entered the ring shortly after midnight ET.
"Due to the overwhelming demand, capacity of cable systems around the country are being overwhelmed. They are shutting down and rebooting some of these cable systems," Showtime executive vice president Stephen Espinoza told ESPN's Sal Paolantonio.
In a text message to Paolantonio shortly before midnight ET, Espinoza said, "We are a go. Enough systems have rebooted to end the delay." Mayweather beat McGregor by 10th-round TKO just before 1 a.m. ET.
Speaking after the fight, Mayweather said PPV servers in Florida and California crashed, leading to the outages.
"We wanted to make sure everything was in the right place [for fans]," the undefeated boxing champion said of the decision to delay the start so that fans would be able to watch.
It was unclear how many people were affected by the outages. Among the cable carriers affected were Xfinity, Atlantic Broadband and Frontier.
Some cable carriers told customers that if the reboot was successful and they did receive a feed, it would be in standard definition and at a cost of $89.95, or $10 less than the $99.95 for high definition.
UFC officials and WME/IMG did not immediately reply to ESPN's repeated requests for comment.
Similar issues caused a delay in Mayweather's fight with Manny Pacquiao in 2015.
McGregor seemed unfazed by the delay, with UFC president Dana White telling ESPN's Brett Okamoto that the UFC star was calm as he waited it out.
Mayweather was said to be the same.
"Floyd is relaxed," boyhood friend Rod Carswell said in a text message to Paolantonio.
Added Mayweather spokesman Kelly Swanson: "If we have to wait, we wait."
Information from ESPN's Darren Rovell was used in this report.