Accounts with several online sports betting firms used by the authors of this blog all experienced some technical issues with both their websites and mobile apps at varying points during Saturday.
Some of the problems stated quite early in the afternoon, well before the Grand National itself.
The winner of the Grand National was the 66/1 outsider Auroras Encore trained by Sue Smith. Such a result may even have been a ‘skinner’* on some books.
It will be especially galling for the bookmakers not to have taken as much money as they could because of the technical difficulties. The fancied horses – Sea Bass, On His Own, Teaforthree – were all beaten, with only Teaforthree making the places.
On Twitter there were numerous posts by people complaining about a certain betting website and threatening to take their business elsewhere. It was a difficult threat to carry out because a number of leading betting websites experienced problems at different times.
The inquiries will begin on Monday when senior management returns to the office as to why the technical contingency plans failed to work. It might transpire that some sites were subjected to cyber attacks (though such attacks are rarely acknowledged publicly), although there is no evidence for such activity at present. But it is unusual for such a number of betting sites to suffer outages even on Grand National day. It could simply be that the betting platforms cannot cope with the Grand National day betting surge.
*A ‘skinner’ refers to a horse upon which the bookmaker has taken no money. If it wins, therefore, the bookmaker does not have to pay out any winnings. An excellent result for the bookmaker.
