Premier League Forced Into Last-Minute VAR Change for Brentford vs West Ham After AWS Outage

The Premier League have confirmed that semi-automated offside technology was not used at the start of West Ham United’s Premier League clash against Brentford at the London Stadium.

On Monday, the two London clubs lined up ahead of the final Premier League fixture of gameweek eight, when, just four minutes ahead of kick-off, an announcement was posted on social media.

The issue relates to the global Amazon Web Services outage, which has impacted sites such as Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom and Lloyds Banking Group.

As reported by BBC News, the platform’s outage monitor Downdetector said it has received more than 6.5 million reports impacting in excess of 1,000 companies worldwide.

The issue first emerged at around 08:00 BST this morning, nine hours later at around 17:00 BST, Amazon cloud computing service (AWS) said some services were still experiencing “significant errors”.

AWS has experienced issues (Credit:Getty)

A statement posted at 19:54 BST by the Premier League Match Centre read: “Due to the impact of today’s global AWS outage, this evening’s match will begin without the use of Semi-Automated Offside Technology (SAOT). If required, the VAR will use virtual offside lines, as in previous seasons, to determine an offside decision. If SAOT becomes available during the game, it will be implemented when appropriate.”

Semi-automated offside technology was first introduced to the Premier League in April of 2025, having also been used in the FA Cup, to increase consistency in relation to offside calls.

According to the Premier League's website, "the operation of semi-automated offside technology does not change the accuracy of the decision-making but enhances the speed, efficiency and consistency of the process".

A fan's view of SAOT (Credit:Getty)

The technology is also used to aid decision making by the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) without the need for manual use of replay monitors or the need to draw lines from the kick-point.

Instead, SAOT recommends a kick-point and automatically creates offside lines on the second rear-most defender and the relevant attacker which, in turn, also saves time.

FIFA first introduced the technology ahead of the 2022 Qatar World Cup. La Liga also introduced SAOT at the start of the 2024/25 campaign while Serie A introduced it in January of 2023. UEFA also uses the system during Champions League, Europa League and Conference League matches.