Sports betting and gaming firm bet365 was among the major global firms impacted as, for a second month in a row, large sections of the internet came to a grinding halt due to technical failures.
Users of websites like X and ChatGPT were hit with error messages due to an outage caused by failures at the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
The problems were akin to an issue experienced by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in October, which took out major social media platforms like Snapchat and Reddit and banks like Lloyds and Halifax.
What happened?
Punters initially began to report problems with bet365 to the website outage tracker Downdetector at approximately 11am GMT.
Shortly after Cloudflare released an update confirming that it had detected “a spike in unusual traffic” to one of its servers beginning at 11.20am, which had caused errors for traffic passing through its network.
As a result, users of a myriad of websites, including bet365, X and ChatGPT, were presented with error messages or told to “unblock cloudflare.com to proceed”.
A further message at 11.48am read: “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service.”
Cloudflare provides internet security through services such as checking whether visitor connections to sites are coming from humans rather than bots.
Approximately 20% of websites use Cloudflare in some way, however, it is unclear what proportion of these sites experienced issues.
At 2.42 the firm then released a further update stating that a fix had been implemented. However, this was caveated with more recent updates confirming that Cloudflare is still working to mitigate “several issues that remain post-deployment”.
Since then, the company’s CTO, Dane Knecht, has confirmed via a post on X that the crash occurred after “a routine configuration change” was implemented.
“That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” he added. “The sites, businesses, and organisations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available, and I apologise for the impact that we caused.”
At the time of writing, approximately 4pm, both bet365’s website and mobile app appear to be working.
Counting the costs
Bet365 is yet to respond to iGaming Expert’s request for comment on the situation, but it’s safe to say that any length of outage for a company the size of bet365 would present a significant financial impact.
Bet365’s own webpage states that it has over 100 million customers worldwide.
Although it’s unlikely that all 100 million were trying to access the operator during the outage, even a small portion of this base being turned away during the approximately three-hour outage period would mean the company lost out on valuable revenue, which may have been spent elsewhere with competitors.
Whilst the day wasn’t a landmark one on the sports calendar, there was Davis Cup tennis action, as well as horse racing meets across Europe. Meanwhile, the iGaming arm of the site was also crippled.
These two occurrences appear to be isolated incidents, however, their close proximity and widespread impacts serve as a sharp reminder to companies like bet365 of their reliance on technical service providers like Cloudflare.
