Super Bowl 55 Causes Sportsbook Sites To Crash
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FanDuel & DraftKings Experience Outages
Both sites experienced issues during the Super Bowl and leading up to it. This varied from state to state, as Michigan was the state that saw the most issues. Customers were complaining of crashes within the app and desktop. FanDuel came out and said that the demand exceeded expectations. DraftKings also had similar issues due to traffic, but they quickly pointed the blame to Kambi, a sports gambling provider. They also are partnered with Penn National Gaming’s Barstool Sports app, but they did not vocally pin the blame on Kambi. DraftKings did come out last year and announced they would end the partnership with Kambi later in 2021.
Both FanDuel and DraftKings have dealt with outages before, even on the Daily Fantasy Sports side of their site. NFL was often the culprit as they had dealt with outages right before regular season kickoffs that resulted in users not being able to enter, edit, or cancel contests. DraftKings did end up sending out $20 credits to affected players.
Kambi’s Response
DraftKings, BetRivers, and Barstool Sportsbook all share Kambi’s services. There were no other errors other than the high volume of bets that began to cause outages. The issue came down to player-related bets and a larger range of outcomes where the technical capacity was not in sync. However, Kambi was able to find this issue and fix it relatively quickly, but the overall high traffic volume caused issues, especially in Michigan and Illinois. Given this is not the first time these things have happened, it should be to nobody’s surprise that these errors occurred on the largest football day of the season.
BetMGM Nevada Issues
BetMGM also had outages while in Nevada, which was narrowed down to their servers within the state. Both customers and staff had system issues for hours during the game. Even betting in person was no success as over the counter issues occurred and within the kiosks. Given the surge in states legalizing and sportsbooks trying to accommodate everybody, we should expect some hiccups early on. Of course, the Super Bowl is not when you want to have them, but hopefully, this gives them better preparation for the future. The timing at BetMGM was certainly not fortunate as, after the game, everything began to work again. Which for those who had bets that needed to be processed, they began processing winning bets. On the plus side, the high volume is a major win for a sports betting scene that is sweeping the nation and expects to grow in 2021.
