Australia’s leading wagering companies have been caught up in a global outage which has also crippled banking, media, retail and airlines.
The major outages began about 3pm AEST and has been linked to a software issue involving CrowdStrike and Microsoft computers.
Betting through Tabcorp’s network was disrupted with the TAB sites in each state displaying a message that ‘betting is temporarily unavailable’. As of 7pm, all but fixed odds services had been restored.
Betting was also unavailable at some stage through Sportsbet, but later returned with fixed odds betting option only.
"We're currently experiencing technical difficulites due to a global Windows Outage. Some services and betting are unavailable as a result. Bet settlement will be delayed during this period. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible." the Sportsbet message said.
Sportsbet later released a further statement.
“Like many organisations, global issues affecting Windows and Crowdstrike are disrupting some of our services,” it said.
“This means many of our betting services are unavailable. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible.”
Payouts on racing and sports have been delayed due to the outage.
Ladbrokes Australia placed a message on it platforms saying that: “Our platform is working fine however there is a world wide 3rd party technology outage that will be affecting many Banks and other institutions. Live betting will also be affected. We apologise for any inconvenience.”
Pointsbet published a message at 3:45 saying: “Our platform is working however due to issues with a third party feed provider, we're facing delays in settling bets. Resulting may be a little slow and tote products disabled.”
Several sites on the BetMakers platform reported similar issues.
The federal government released a statement just after 5pm saying it was liaising with the National Cyber Security Co-ordinator.
“The information as it stands is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies,” it said.
“As the Cyber Security Coordinator has said, there is no information to suggest this is a cyber security incident and they are continuing to engage across key stakeholders.”
“The National Emergency Mechanism group will meet shortly, co-chaired by the National Emergency Management Agency.”
