While other sports betting sites appeared unaffected by the incident, Friday’s outage underscores the importance of certain service providers in the online gaming industry.
Geoff Zochodne • Senior News Analyst
Jul 19, 2024 • 14:22 ET • 2 min read
Photo By – USA TODAY Sports
The global technology outage plaguing airlines, banks, and other businesses has also disrupted the operations of several Entain PLC-owned sports betting brands, including BetMGM and Sports Interaction.
“BetMGM is experiencing temporary issues due to global IT outages,” the bookmaker said on X (formerly Twitter) Friday morning. “We are working hard to resolve this and will update customers when we are up and running. Thank you for your patience.”
As of around 1:45 p.m. ET on Friday, BetMGM was still offline, with its website noting that “our teams are working hard to get everything up and running, and we will update you once we’re fully restored.”
BetMGM is a joint venture of Entain and MGM Resorts International. However, another Entain brand, the Ontario-facing Sports Interaction, was also down on Friday and remained so into the afternoon.
We are impacted as well! ⁰⁰Due to the global outage affecting various industries, our site is in maintenance mode. We aim to resume operations this afternoon. Your account is secure.⁰⁰Our teams are ready, but the outage may restrict full assistance. We apologize for any…
— Sports Interaction (@SIASport) July 19, 2024
“Due to the global outage affecting various industries, our site is in maintenance mode,” SIA said on its X account. “We aim to resume operations this afternoon. Your account is secure.”
Other Entain bookmaking brands, such as Ladbrokes, were offline on Friday as well.
A delicate ecosystem
While other sports betting sites such as bet365, DraftKings, and FanDuel appeared unaffected by the tech outage, the incident underscores the importance of certain service providers in the online gaming industry. In jurisdictions where mobile wagering is legal, online sportsbooks are the preferred option for bettors, and any disruption can be annoying for customers and costly for operators.
Sportsbooks have grappled before with cyberattacks, although this latest incident appears to be different.
The tech outage reportedly stems from an issue with an update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, upon which many companies rely, that affected Microsoft’s Windows systems. CrowdStrike said it had found the problem and deployed a fix.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” the company said in a statement. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack.”