Ladbrokes, Sportsbet Sites Crash Ahead of Melbourne Cup

Just ahead of Australia's Melbourne Cup the websites of Sportsbet and Ladbrokes crashed under the stress of the number of wagers trying to be placed.

The Melbourne Cup was held on Tuesday and saw an influx of punters wagering accounts and trying to place bets before the race got underway. The outage applied on mobile devices and computers, and sent punters looking elsewhere. At one point, BetEasy said that they were signing up as many as 500 punters a minute to place the wagers. Tabcorp, the largest betting group in Australia said that they expected to take in 15 million wagers, with more than 4,300 wagers a second being the peak amount brought in.

For their parts, Ladbrokes and Sportsbet were working hard to restore services, but that didn't mean that gamblers were sparing them from their ire. Many took to Twitter to voice their frustrations.

Some of those tweets are encapsulated below:

@Ladbrokes what compensation will I be receiving for today? Loyal customer being let down on a very important day. Could not put on anywhere near the ammount of bets I wanted. least you could do is offer some compensation, or you will lose another customer (a lot of them today)

— James Ball (@JamesBall6) November 6, 2018

What an absolute failure by @ladbrokescomau . See you later. #neveragain #Ladbrokes #ladbrokesdown #MELBOURNECUP

— Paul Johnson (@pjohnson_sports) November 6, 2018

#ladbrokes still can't open my betting statement punters let down today you owe us

— mat (@matthome2) November 6, 2018

As of press time all affected sites appeared to be back up and running, although it appears the books all have some work to do to win back their irate customers.

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