FanDuel Outage Disrupts NFL Betting for Thousands of Users

FanDuel encountered several technical issues on Sunday during live NFL games, preventing thousands of bettors from accessing or tracking their bets. Reports on Downdetector showed that more than 6,000 users experienced problems, with many reporting they couldn't see active bets or cash out during games.

Many users voiced their anger about the outage on social media, with many claiming that they couldn't keep track of their bets and were losing money as a result. Some people also said that FanDuel's customer service channels weren't working during the outage. 

Others said that when they tried to open individual game pages, they received "Page not found" errors, which stopped them from checking the results or accessing new odds. It was a rough day for one of our best sports betting sites.

While the issue appeared to affect a large portion of FanDuel's customer base, the company assured users that all wagers would remain valid and would settle correctly once the system was restored. FanDuel acknowledged problems within the "My Bets" section and said its technical team was actively working to restore functionality. It wouldn't be surprising to see the company offer FanDuel promos in the wake of the outage, but there has been no formal word on that yet.

Some bettors, particularly those in the Midwest, reported ongoing problems with the FanDuel sportsbook hours after the initial outage, including blocked access to cash-out features. The company hasn't said what caused the failure yet, but FanDuel has said that it is looking into it. The failure happened during one of the busiest betting windows of the NFL season. 

AWS crash adds to struggles

FanDuel's recent outage follows another significant disruption that occurred just over a week ago. Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage that affected millions of systems worldwide, including a few sports betting companies. The early-morning breakdown disrupted access to major websites such as Facebook, Venmo, and Snapchat, as well as FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics Sportsbook.

Both FanDuel and DraftKings informed users via social media that they were experiencing platform issues and delays in processing withdrawals due to the outage. DraftKings said withdrawals were "still slow to process," while FanDuel confirmed users were having trouble logging in and accessing their accounts.

Fanatics Sportsbook also reported technical problems, leaving many bettors unable to place or track wagers. Several users complained that balances had vanished or bets were not appearing on their dashboards. Others said they missed out on winning opportunities because they couldn't place bets before events began.

Amazon eventually announced that the root problem had been "fully mitigated" and that most systems were operating normally again. However, sporadic disruptions persisted across various platforms throughout the day. 

Cybersecurity experts later said that the outage was probably caused by a mistake in AWS's internal configuration. However, the size of the failure made them worried about how much major online betting sites rely on a small number of cloud infrastructure providers.