Champions League bet365 outage: "Any potential opportunity to cash out on my bets had been lost."

Imago

On Wednesday 29 January, British bookmaker bet365 have found themselves inundated with complaints, having suffered an outage during one of the busiest nights of the football season.

18 matches kicked off at once in the Champions League, in what was the final round of fixtures in the new-style league phase of the competition. 

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The outage came in the second half of these games and has resulted in customers claiming to have lost out on thousands of pounds, as they were unable to ‘cash-out’ on their bets during this time. 

A cash-out allows customers to manage the positions of their open bets by accepting an early offer, on their bets, from the bookmaker, which they can cash out in advance of full time to guarantee a profit, regardless of the final result. 

This is a particularly popular option for bettors who have placed accumulators and bet builders; involving multiple selections. 

These bets have the potential to bring in large payouts but always run the risk of delivering nothing at all, with just one change to a single result. 

The company’s outage, which they described as “issues to our service”, prevented their users from being able to cash out on their bets, while in-play results were favourable to them. 

Customers have complained that by the time the issue was resolved and they had access to their bets, results had swung against them and the opportunity to cash-out had been missed, through no fault of their own. 

Matt Zarb-Cousin, the director of Clean Up Gambling, a not-for-profit campaign established to reform Britain's gambling laws, gave his thoughts on the consequences of the outage. 

He said: “If we had effective consumer protection regulation, as well as a gambling ombudsman like the Government promised ages ago, then all bets would be settled as a cash-out at the point bet365’s website crashed.”

The Stoke-based bookmaker who are an official sponsor of the Champions League released a statement, at around 10pm on the same night of the outage, telling customers they were “experiencing issues with our services and our technical team are working to resolve this as soon as possible.”

By that stage the Champions League matches had already finished, with the outage having started during the midway point of the second-half of games, which is a busy time for cashing out bets. 

This writer was one of the many bet365 customers to have experienced issues with the betting site on Wednesday night. 

"I placed five Champions League bets before kick off, of which three were settled before half-time. That left two open bets to manage during the second half of games, but when I checked in on bet365’s site, I was unable to access them. 

"The first sign that something was wrong was that my account balance was not displayed. I then found that my open bets were missing from the ‘my bets’ section of the site, removing the option to cash-out on them. 

"An attempt to refresh the website saw me redirected to a holding page from Cloudflare, a content delivery network service designed to provide high availability for websites, even during periods when they are experiencing heavy traffic. 

"Like many other users, by the time the site was operating effectively again, any potential opportunity to cash out on my bets had been lost."