Multiple Sportsbook Outages Sports Betting

Multiple Sportsbook Outages Experienced During Super Bowl LV

By Blake Roberts Founder & Editor in Chief Updated: 13 February 2021

Blake Roberts Founder & Editor in Chief

Blake Roberts is the founder of Betting.US and is currently heading the creative team as Editor in Chief. Born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, Blake is a great sports fan, with football and basketball being his favorite. He’s our trusted voice for all betting-related matters.

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Last weekend was a very exciting one in the world of live sports, with huge numbers of people gearing up for the long-awaited Super Bowl LV, which was won convincingly by Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. One of the most eagerly awaited sports events of the year, many sports fans were excited about placing their bets and enjoying the action of this hugely popular event.

However, for some sportsbooks, the Super Bowl weekend was something of a disaster, due to a range of outages that caused problems for both the operators and for sports fans. Issues were experienced by a number of operators including BetMGM, DraftKings, and FanDuel.

Problems Blamed on Increased Traffic

The past ten months have been difficult for sportsbooks and fans due to the shutdown of live sports last year, coupled with the closure of retail sportsbooks for several months.

While online sportsbooks have seen record numbers of people placing bets online since the outbreak of the global pandemic, the affected operators may have missed out on some significant betting activity over the past weekend.

During the big game on Sunday between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs, BetMGM suffered an outage at its sportsbook kiosks in Nevada. In addition, the outage also affected its mobile sports betting facilities.

In a Twitter post released after the game ended, officials from BetMGM wrote:

We’re aware of the current issues in NV across the BetMGM app and within our retail sportsbooks. Our teams are actively working on fixing these issues and we appreciate the patience of our NV customers as we work to restore full functionality.

FanDuel and DraftKings also experienced issues at the weekend, with the two sportsbook giants suffering outages prior to the start of the game. Those looking to place bets through the platforms were unable to access their mobile sportsbooks in the run-up to kick-off.

According to the three providers, the problems were created due to a surge in traffic from eager fans looking to place bets on the game. Officials said that this resulted in technical difficulties that caused systems to crash and left fans unable to access them for some time.

Officials from the sportsbooks also took to social media in order to apologize to fans and keep them updated on the situation. DraftKings executive, Stephen Miraglia, also stated that the problems stemmed from the surge in traffic as huge numbers of fans tried to access their accounts and place bets.

Settling Bets into the Early Hours

It was also reported that BetMGM had to keep its retail sportsbooks open until the early hours of Monday morning as a result of the technical problems. This was so that all winning bets could be settled following the outages.

Within several hours of tweeting fans to let them know about the problems, BetMGM confirmed that all winning bets from its mobile platform had been settled. However, winners who placed bets at the retail sportsbook had to wait longer to receive their prizes.