New Delhi, July 14 -- Fourteen minutes into the Fifa World Cup group-stage football match between Qatar and Switzerland, the referee awarded Switzerland a penalty kick. Two Swiss players looked marginally offside in the build-up, but the video assistant referee (VAR) quickly checked the footage and cleared them. Breel Embolo went on to score a goal, and that should have been that.

But it was not. For the first time that day, the 3D animation that had accompanied every offside decision in the tournament was not visible to TV audiences, and fans began to suspect something was afoot. Fifa said that its semi-automated offside system had suffered "a brief technical outage."

When video evidence was produced 4 hours later, the lines had been d...