MORTON chairman Crawford Rae has apologised and promised to issue refunds after the club’s live stream of their Betfred Cup clash against Queen of the South failed.

The service crashed before the Ton’s first game in seven months had even kicked off.

Several hundreds supporters had signed up to watch the match, paying £10 for the service.

Cappielow bosses were forced to hastily make the stream free to view on the club’s YouTube channel as complaints flooded in.

An emergency board meeting was held in the wake of the failure and the club has now confirmed it will pay everyone back.

The club will also roll out a new system to cope with the demand in time for their next fixture, against Queen's Park on Tuesday.

Mr Rae said: “Everyone at the club was devastated at the failure of our match streaming service on Tuesday night, which was a major letdown for our loyal fans and a huge blow both reputational and financial to the club.

“On behalf of the board, I would like to take the opportunity to apologise unreservedly to all affected fans.

“None of the board have any expertise in the technologies required to stream matches and have employed professionals to advise and set this up for us.

“Whilst we are in their hands, we equally recognise that the buck stops here.

“We convened an emergency meeting of our board attended by the developers of our system and representation from MCT.

“We are going to refund in full everyone who paid to stream the match.

“This a major administrative task for our finance people but we will get this done as soon as humanly possible."

Mr Rae says the developers believe they have identified what caused the IT shambles on Tuesday and steps are being taken to find a solution.

It involves the club website www.gmfc.net being completely bypassed.

Fans will have to register their details once again and this time they will receive an email containing a link taking them to the streaming service.

Rae said: “In simple terms, there are two elements to streaming a match – the ticketing/paywall system and the actual match stream.

“The actual stream is a separate system operated by Amazon but access to that depends on the streaming ticketing system on our own website and it was that which failed.

“That there was a potential problem with this was recognised in advance of Tuesday but steps taken to mitigate the increased volumes through it failed.

"To cure the problem, we are splitting the streaming ticketing system into a separate website, optimised to handle large volumes.

“In addition, instead of after purchase logging on to view the match via our website, we intend to instead issue purchasers with an email containing a link directly to the stream, thereby bypassing our website altogether.

“This will ensure that anyone purchasing a stream will be able to view it irrespective of whether our website is up or down.”

Club chiefs hope to hold a trial run out the new system over the weekend,.

Mr Rae added: "I fully accept that this episode was unacceptable for our fans – and very expensive for the club – and once again apologise to all.”