While other sports sites do not appear to be affected by the incident, Friday’s outage highlights the importance of certain service providers in the online gambling industry.
The global generation disruption affecting airlines, banks and other companies has also disrupted the operations of several sports brands owned by Entain PLC, including BetMGM and Sports Interaction.
“BetMGM is experiencing transience issues due to global computer outages,” the sportsbook said at X (formerly Twitter) on Friday morning. “We are working hard for this factor and will notify our consumers when we are in operation. Thank you for your patience. “
Around 1:45 p. m. Starting at 1:00 p. m. ET on Friday, BetMGM was still offline and its online page said that “our groups are working hard to get everything up and running, and we will update you once we are fully restored. “
BetMGM is a joint venture of Entain and MGM Resorts International. However, another Entain brand, Ontario-based Sports Interaction, also fell on Friday and remained so into the afternoon.
“Due to the global disruption affecting industries, our site is in maintenance mode,” SIA said on its X account. “Our purpose is to resume operations this afternoon. Your account is secure.
Other Entain bookmaker brands, such as Ladbrokes, were offline on Friday.
While other sportsbooks such as bet365, DraftKings and FanDuel do not appear to be affected by the supply disruption, the incident highlights the importance of certain service providers in the online gaming industry. In jurisdictions where mobile telephony is legal, online sports are the favorite option for bettors, and any interruption can be inconvenient for consumers and costly for operators.
Sports betting has had to deal with cyberattacks before, but this latest incident turns out to be different.
The generation outage is believed to have been due to an update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which many corporations rely on, that affected Microsoft’s Windows systems. CrowdStrike said it discovered the factor and implemented a fix.
“CrowdStrike is actively running with consumers affected by a defect detected in a single content update for Windows hosts,” the company said in a statement. “Mac and Linux hosts are not affected. It is not a cyberattack.