Major Microsoft Outage Affects Sportsbooks and Casinos
Grounded flights, shutdown of TV stations, and banking service issues are just a few examples of the impacts caused by the Microsoft 365 outage on Friday, which paralyzed many businesses. Casino operators and sportsbooks were also affected. How extensive is the problem?
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Global CrowdStrike-Microsoft Outage
The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike admitted that the issue was caused by an update to its Falcon antivirus software, which is designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.
Nevertheless, an outage of this magnitude is highly unusual. Experts are weighing in on its far-reaching consequences and the dangers of so many areas of life depending on the reliability of a single system.
As a result of the outage, many critical areas of daily life were paralyzed. Hospitals were unable to register patients, and airports saw passengers forced to wait as air traffic operations were brought to a halt.
Less critical areas of daily life, such as entertainment, also suffered, including e.g. television and gambling. For the iGaming industry, where many companies were affected by the outage, this serves as a serious warning for the future.
Which Operators Were Affected by the Outage
We already know that customers of Entain-operated brands Ladbrokes and Coral reported issues, seeing messages on their devices about temporary technical problems.
Ladbrokes responded to the numerous reports and issued an official statement: “You might have seen the news about the global technical issue affecting airlines, banks, etc. Unfortunately, we’re experiencing this too. We’re working hard to resolve the issue but don’t know when it will be fixed. Thanks for being so patient and apologies for the inconvenience.”
The issues also impacted the world’s gambling capital, Las Vegas, where local casino customers reported on social media that “the casino’s computer system keeps crashing repeatedly.”
Sportsbet, co-owned by international giant Flutter, also reported issues with the proper functioning of its platform: “Like many organizations, global 3rd party technical issues are disrupting some of our betting services, including customer services. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible.”
The full scale of the problem is still unknown, both in terms of critical infrastructure and the entertainment industry. Online operator customers are reporting widespread issues, including problems with withdrawals and performing basic operations on their accounts. Over time, we will likely learn of additional operators whose systems have been affected by the outage.