Week 7 in the NFL delivered a bit of a head aches to several sports betting apps, who dealt with multiple outages that affected bettor’s ability to place their bets.
It all began during last week’s Thursday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. During the second half several online apps, including BetRivers, DraftKings Sportsbook and FanDuel Sportsbook, all has issues due to an outage by their geolocation provider GeoComply.
GeoComply tracks where app users are physically located in the country. During the outage the apps were unable to determine where bettors were located which meant they were unable to accept their bets.
On Sunday more outages hit DraftKings and BetRivers. Both operators were unable to accept bets from some customers during what is typically the busiest betting day of the week. The reason for these outages was not reported.
This all comes on the heels of the massive Stats Perform outage earlier in the month that crippled several daily fantasy sports operators, including FanDuel and DraftKings. On October 10 Stats Perform, which provides live stats to several daily fantasy sports sites, suffered a cyber attack which took them completely offline.
That entire weekend no live stats were provided for daily fantasy sports, and reportedly FanDuel and DraftKings were forced to enter stats manually for all games well after they had finished to complete contests and deliver payouts to winners.
Cyber attacks are becoming more common as more and more sportsbook and daily fantasy sports operators launch apps. BetOnline was hit with a cyber attack the same day at Stats Perform, and SBTech also suffered a cyber attack earlier this year.
Sports betting apps have greatly increased access to betting by bringing it right into bettor’s homes, or anywhere they go with their smart phone. However, as with all technology when it fails it leaves users totally in the dark.
It will be interesting to see if these recent outages lead to better service in the future and new fixes, or if they are a sign of things to come during the current NFL season.
