It is one thing to have downtime in the middle of the night due to planned maintenance. It is another thing to have unscheduled web server failures due to not being able to meet peak demand. And it is another thing entirely for this to happen on a real-time trading platform. How many years has this been happening at Betfair now?

singero, I cd live very easily with suspensions and unavailable markets, what I can't be doing w/ is ambiguous messages about whether yr bet has been taken or not.

There has to be complete clarity so that bettors can manage their liabilities.

ALL the good traders on here claim to follow two fundamental rules.
Only trade both in and out at good value at the time of the trades.
Only trade in amounts that are intelligently proportional to your capital base.

So, as such, if and when they are caught with a leg up by an unexpected outage, what is, or should be, the real problem exposure wise ?

If the opening trade was good value when it was opened, then if you then run with it to expiry of the event ( even if involuntarily) then over time they ( the opening trades) should still come out ahead long term.

If that basic law of long term probability is not reassuring enough to many traders, that is in the short term they're somehow going to be killed if they can't close out their open position, then they are overtrading in a bet size/capital sense.( Warren Buffet put it more succinctly when he said " Don't buy any share that you would not be happy owning if the share markets went out of existence for the next 10 years ".)

I get the feeling on here that many people are trading willy nilly, going one way and then another on a whim and a prayer. Not just only trading good value if and when they see it. IR has created all sorts of false trading opportuniteies for many amateurs on here.

But I can see how outages are very, very annoying in the sense of closing out obviously losing positions to reduce commissions or to retrieve capital to move onto other events, but is not the end of the world if you can't do that very occasionally.

The key point is, or should be, whether all participants are being treated absolutely equally by BF when these outages occur. This is, it seems to me, what Askari is correctly alluding to.

It would seem that BF is very inconsistent and inequitable in its handling of these outages and that is totally wrong.

For me the key point is that, as per their self-description, bf are a company that use technology to manage risk.

When their technology fails, the risk shd be passed onto bf themselves.

FATH, it wd mean settling markets in an imbalanced way--in other words, voiding losers' bets (if there were some circs. around them wh/ meant they were unable to manage their liabilities) while honouring the winning bets of their counterparties.

The alternative is having a punctual suspension time across all platforms and timely messages accurately informing bettors of their liabilities.

I accept that outages are a fact of life and that they can managed by sensible staking re the size of yr bank.

But I do feel that the messages concerning whether bets have been taken shd be accurate. 'A transaction error occurred' and no bets shown on the screen (for manual bettors) implies that the bet has been turned down. It seems correct to me for bets of this kind to be voided (or all bets of this kind to be honoured).

Well, to bf's credit they have done exactly what I suggested--treated all ambiguous bets getting the same error message in the same way.

They've got me off the hook of this loss (in the mid-three figs., or enough to irritate me) by applying a commonsense rule. Well done!

Had their site been suspended and no bets allowed, I wd accept that bettors shd accept their final bf screens as their final results. This is the situation that wd eventuate if bf were able to impose a universal 'suspend'.

I'm with you on this Rocket.

If they get their a*ses reamed every time they have a prime time outage then I imagine they are all walking about with prolapsed colons.

An outage once in a while is acceptable. It's going to happen.


Outages that consistently occur on heavy traffic periods with no firewall for those unfortunate enough not to be on the Betfair VIP list are frankly not acceptable.

I do appreciate your point SP and I don't want to side with Betfair on this but lets be honest, Betfair going down and the LSE going down are two very different kettles of fish.

And Betfair certainly act like it too.

As someone pointed out above Bf claims to be a technology leader in this area and they also mention the volumes and number of bets they handle ...

It's not about comparing sizes, it's about sticking to reality: if time and money is spent on the non-core business, time and money will not be spent on the core business

In such scenario, outages are likely to happen on a regular basis ... (it sounds like if I were predicting the future, but it seems like if I were just telling history)

You sound like a panicking submariner.

actually, it looks to me as if one of their servers has been playing up today ... it looks like the problem they had ages ago when one server wasn't working properly and if you were unfortunate enough  to connect to its IP number you got really erratic response times.

anyone else having a similar problem?

they were supposed to have sorted all the issues out

"server down" is bull****

A company this big should be using high availability clustering with plenty of failovers.

Utterly pathetic.

What do you get if you mix red with blue

nope

Ye old Betfayre seems to go down more frequently than a Kings X crack **** although unlike their share price it does come back up gain.
More seriously I'm beginning to question it's even worth staying with BF. I lost money at the weekend because of BF's technical incompetence and a robotic apology is no substitute for recompense. I'm inching ever closer to using the BetDack acc. I opened when Betfear  crashed the Saturday before Cheltenham.
Still, it could be worse - I could be a BF shareholder.

was down earlier so i used my old tabsportsbet account to place some tennis bets...no dramas

Maybe you need to deposit more money ? 2 p may not be enough to have in ones account to get full access to the site ?