BetMGM Among Entain Brands Hit Hardest by Tech Outage

On July 19, many industries were temporarily brought to their knees by a major IT outage, including Entain PLC-owned BetMGM, one of the industry's best sports betting sites.

Entain PLC, which owns 50% of BetMGM's sports betting and iGaming operator, along with MGM Resorts International, incurred severe disruptions to its United Kingdom and United States brands.

BetMGM's websites and sports betting apps went down on Friday morning and weren't fully restored until about noon ET on July 20, leaving those who've used a BetMGM bonus code without access to one of our best sports betting apps for more than 24 hours.

Entain's UK iGaming brands, including Ladbrokes, Sportingbet, and Bwin, were also offline during the peak of the outage.

The Roar, BetMGM's blog websites - offered in Canada and the U.S. - were more severely impacted, with the Canadian site offline until about noon ET on July 21. 

Though all BetMGM services were restored by Sunday afternoon, the financial implications on the impacted Entain PLC brands, specifically BetMGM, haven't yet been disseminated.

BetMGM's primary North American competitors, including FanDuel, DraftKings, and Caesars, were not impacted by the outage. 

However, Sports Interaction, one of the best Ohio sports betting apps - also owned by Entain - was impacted. Like BetMGM, it was offline on Friday. 

What caused the widespread outage?

The problem was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows” from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. 

CrowdStrike said a sensor configuration update to its Falcon platform “triggered a logic error," leading to computer crashes. The outage caused havoc for various industries, including banks and businesses across the globe. 

The aviation industry was also severely impacted, causing thousands of grounded flights through the weekend in the US and across the globe - almost 3,000 flights within or into the U.S. on Friday alone. 

On Friday afternoon, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz issued the following statement on NBC's Today Show: 

“Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected. We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on. As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts.”

Financial impact of the world's biggest IT failure

Though we don't yet know the financial impact on BetMGM, billions of dollars have thus far been lost, most notably to the banking and aviation sectors. 

Elon Musk said it was the "biggest IT fail ever." 

As of July 22, CrowdStrike stocks were down 10.6% to $272.46 a share. That decrease was in addition to the 11.1% drop on July 19, the day of the incident. 

As of Monday, Crowdstrike's overall valuation had dropped by about $16 billion since Friday's incident. 

The outage also led to a $23 billion loss in Microsoft’s market value within hours.