[protein]

Is it down for anyone else?

[Ibrakadabra]

Yes, one of the worst days ever there.

[lukahh]

down for me, too. can log in, but can't do anything

[jairocon]

I think it works through the API... but seriously BetFair picks the worst days to go down.

EDIT: I was able to login just now... so it might be running again... after most of the matches started already.

[Toit]

I don't think they 'pick to go down'

[protein]

Got my ******* Turkish Superleague bet done finally.

Annoying

[SBR Lou]

Everyone back in? Appears to be in order.

[Ibrakadabra]

No, definitely not in order here. I´m unable to bet even though I´m in.

Trying to place a bet gives the information that the market is down due technical problems. Apart from that things looks normal.

[rigolleto]

is up but horse races show suspended

[AimingHigh]

Truly appalling day on Betfair. What's worse is now they're "back" and showing money available, you don't find out till you try to bet it that the market is suspended.

I hope some financial journalist picks up on this, publishes how much they lost, and hits their share price.

[Hareeba!]

can't recall ever seeing such a long unplanned outage

[Hareeba!]

working now

[Stefan]

Betfair is in a contest with Pinnacle. Who is collecting the most inaccessibility time. Pinnacle is in front, but Betfair is catching up.

I don't understand what's going on there. Are both bookies expanding too fast or are there DOS attacks?

[FourLengthsClear]

Betfair is in a contest with Pinnacle. Who is collecting the most inaccessibility time. Pinnacle is in front, but Betfair is catching up.

I don't understand what's going on there. Are both bookies expanding too fast or are there DOS attacks?

Don't know but this would be my guess.
For most of today I access via an API application even though the main website was down.

[Border Gadgie]

Seems like there a far too many glitzy changes and additions which are slowing the site down for everyone or crashing it, rather than concentrate on their core business of being the best betting exchange available.

[barcelonafc]

the cricket traders would have been affected the most especially as it was during the india vs south africa match,

[AimingHigh]

Seems like there a far too many glitzy changes and additions which are slowing the site down for everyone or crashing it, rather than concentrate on their core business of being the best betting exchange available.

I agree. That stupid new in-play interface. It actually makes it harder to bet. What's the point of it? And taking up more of the screen and resources with silly games, that you can't just remove from the display options for your account. I have to assume that they've looked into what attracts punters to bet, and their research shows they want glitz and games. Just terribly frustrating for the rest of us. Like the new 188 site. Utter garbage.

[protein]

Still I´d prefer Betfair over Pinny when it comes to downtime.

[Stumpage]

Christ what a disaster that was.....

[barcelonafc]

Apology and an explanation


On Saturday March 12, from 14:05 through 20:01, Betfair's website failed. We know how frustrating this is for our customers and offer our sincere apologies to all affected.

We are now looking at ways in which we can make up Saturday’s events to you.

We are working as hard as possible to ensure Betfair offers as reliable a site as possible. In a normal week we make at least 15 changes to the Betfair website but we have resolved not to release any new products or features for the next seven days. This should give maximum stability throughout a busy week that includes the Cheltenham Festival, cricket World Cup and Champions League football.

Below is an explanation of what went wrong and what we have done to fix the issue.

When the website failed on Saturday, our first step was to disable Betfair for all our customers on the web, API and mobile services. Once we identified the actual problem, we determined that we needed our website "available" but with betting disallowed. We recovered the site internally around 18:00 and re-enabled betting as of 20:00 once we were certain it was stable.

Here is what actually happened:

After performing certain types of website changes, an issue developed that caused our servers to temporarily slow down, processing just one thing at a time (single threading) instead of thousands of user requests in parallel. This "single threading" behaviour was introduced some time ago to protect against occasional broken pages caused by serving content while it is changing. In tech speak, our servers weren't thread-safe on certain types of content changes.

This has been an operational concern for several weeks as our traffic has reached record volumes week after week. While we had several operational protections in place to limit these types of changes during peak load, we missed an important one. Every 15 minutes, an automated process was publishing exactly the type of content that triggers the issue described above. Yesterday we hit a tipping point as the web servers reached a point where it was taking longer than 15 minutes to complete their update - essentially rendering the servers unusable.

Then in an attempt to quickly shed load, we triggered a process to disable some of the computationally intensive features on the site. Unfortunately, the way this was done triggered a complete recompile of every page on our site, for every user, in every locale. Under our normal Saturday usage, recovery took several hours.

After spotting the pattern, we've recognised this has been going on with varying impact since February 8, 2011. During periods of increased user traffic, our customers would experience this issue in the form of slow navigation or a "sticky" user experience. Yesterday was simply a tipping point, made worse by our recovery attempt.

We've fixed this problem now. We've disabled the original automated job and rebuilt it to update content safely. We've tripled the capacity of our web server farm to spread our load even more thinly. We've fixed our process for disabling features so that we won't make things worse. We've updated our operational processes and introduced a whole new raft of monitoring to spot this type of issue. We've also isolated the underlying web server issue so that we can change our content at will without triggering the switch to single-threading.

We believe these changes will bring the stability we all desire and thank you for your continued custom.

Yours faithfully,

Niall Wass – Chief Marketing & Development Officer
Tony McAlister – Chief Technology Officer

[Ibrakadabra]

Betfair is in a contest with Pinnacle. Who is collecting the most inaccessibility time. Pinnacle is in front, but Betfair is catching up.

You really think so? I´m a bit suprised to hear this since I think Betfair have had unusually few problems lately.

Of course apart from what happened yesterday...

[Stacocakes]

Hopefully no one here got caught with outstanding offers during this downtime. Who knows how that was handled. Seems like all of these sites go down these days.Is it that hard to have a stable website?

[Santo]

Betfair have a well established policy of cancelling unmatched offers as soon as betting is disabled.

[the sink]

Yes pinnacle #1 on crappy site and betfair is #2 and then was probably matchbook

[barcelonafc]

Hopefully no one here got caught with outstanding offers during this downtime. Who knows how that was handled. Seems like all of these sites go down these days.Is it that hard to have a stable website?

mate traders got done for thousands, there is a petition been started against betfair, as if they will care though,

betfair are greedy greedy people, i just wonder wen they will raise commision rates or add some other tax.

its esential when using betfair you have another exchange account and a telephone in case things go up, i heard some cricket traders say that they tried to call betfair and lay bets off but couldnt get through.

[Hareeba!]

Betfair have a well established policy of cancelling unmatched offers as soon as betting is disabled.

true

not like I once suffered from Matchbook failing to do so

[Hareeba!]

mate traders got done for thousands, there is a petition been started against betfair, as if they will care though,

utterly absurd to say they don't care
the biggest loser out of this would have been Betfair themselves
for every trader who got caught there would have been another who got lucky
just part of the risk of playing online

[barcelonafc]

have you ever spoke to betfair cs?

they are ignorant pieces of shit, and i know 100 traders who will back me up on that.

is it that difficult to keep a site stable? with the money they make it should be top notch,

not fukking crashing on a saturday when most traders are baw deep in trades, people are sick of it!!!

they are total liers too, i have been trading a soccer match and it suspends, ive phoned asking why and they say they have lost the feed, even though im sitting watching the match on bet365, and via my motorised satellite dish.

ive been on betfair 10 years and its the same old story with them.

and it shouldnt be part of the risk, i know one guy that lost out on 6 grand because of it, you think thats fair?

fukin scum of the earth betfair!!!!!

more interested in money than there clients.


FACT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[noyb]

fukin scum of the earth betfair!!!!!

more interested in money than there clients.

betfair's downtimes are annoying and extremely amateurish. yet all of this bitching and whining on these boards is pathetic, especially all those made up stories about how somehow everybody seems to have lost millions because of this downtime (there should also be plenty of winners, where are they?).

nobody's forcing you to play with betfair. if you don't like it, just leave. if, like me, you aren't afraid to admit you need them far more than they need you, stfu instead of bitching on an internet forum they don't even read.

[barcelonafc]

if u lost nearly 1000 because of it would you be happy? would'nt you be bitching?

exactly u fukkin toss-rat!!!!

[noyb]

you've been betting with bf for 10 years you say. i have been for 5-6 years. in that time i've experienced tens (probably even >100) betfair downtimes. you must have experienced even more. what happened this weekend is not something new at all, betfair has always been unreliable in the it-department.

if after all this time you still have not either 1. taken your business elsewhere or 2. accepted the real possibility of the bf site going down at the worst possible moment and also accepting any p&l as a result, you deserve every penny lose.

if you happen to have lost this particular weekend, be a big boy and take it like a man instead of crying about it. with your experience you should have known this could happen.

btw is a "toss-rat" even a word?

[FourLengthsClear]

if u lost nearly 1000 because of it would you be happy? would'nt you be bitching?

exactly u fukkin toss-rat!!!!

Like yourself, I have been trading on Betfair for nearly 10 years and site outages have cost me many times. I have gained from them many times too, though.

It is just one of those things.

There is not much that can be done, canceling all bets on a particular market is not viable. Site outages that leave you in a position where an exposure cannot be hedged or unwound are not that common.

Betfair have said many times that they need to boost their ability to cope with the ever growing traffic (ironically much of this is caused by the same traders who complain despite have applications set to update data every 150 milliseconds), I just hope they get ahead of the curve sooner rather than later.

[Border Gadgie]

Betfair needs to get back to basics, far too many times downtime has occured.....much of the time caused by betfair themselves, constantly letting their I.T. people loose to mess around with the site. Everyone is aware that it is the bet betting exchange........no doubt helped by the fact there is no credible alternative to provide strong competition.

They really need to get their act together though, they advertise games going 'in play' then lose the live feeds all too easily, so the punter is left in limbo, its completely irrelevant that 'you know the risks' its not designed to perform as risky site, the only thing customers should have to worry about is the result of your wagers..... and not about whether or not someone is messing round with website without you even being aware of it.

The fact they sent apology admitting it makes it even more ludicrous, why shouldnt people be angry when they have lost money? If it was only an occasional downtime lapse then maybe you would just accept it, but its happening too frequently and at the moment the betfair cannot be relied on give decent consistent service.

[Hareeba!]

Using technology of any description carries with it some risk.
Shit happens.
Get used to it.
If you don't like it don't do it.

[jairocon]

Wow, what a disappointment... their apology is to give 100% commission cashback on selected markets. And these include only 3 soccer plays... some horses and some cricket. Way to go betfair. What a BS apology. Why not do the whole UEFA schedule for this week at least. Oh no... that would be too much money out of their coffers.