PokerStars Site Down For Two Hours After Server Crash

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Tuesday, March 10th, 2015 | Written by Charles Washington

On Tuesday, March 3 at 4.40am (ET), PokerStars experienced technical difficulties after its servers crashed, and the site remained frozen for the next two hours before the action eventually resumed at 6.40am (ET). In the meantime, the outage interrupted PokerStars’ games on all its network domains across the globe, and players who found themselves stuck in sit and go’s, tournaments, or cash games only had their concerns allayed after PokerStars’ ring game manager Baard Dahl took to the Two Plus Two forum to inform players the site was aware of the problem and was doing its best to resolve the issue. Likewise, Lee Jones, head of corporate communications for PokerStars, tweeted a similar message stating:

“Hi folks we know that @PokerStars is down the software guys are swarming on it. We’ll update you the moment we know more. #HangInThere”

Issue Resolved Within 2 Hours

While there followed a number of complaints as to the amount of time it took PokerStars to restore normal services, and the site’s tardy response to customer feedback during the outage, PokerStars was actually fortunate the incident took place during off-peak hours, otherwise the blackout could have been considerably more disruptive. As it was a number of stories made their way into the media recounting the frustrating experiences of players, including that of Welsh player Dylan Herbert, who entered PokerStars’ Big $2.20 tournament and 9 hours later made it all the way past the 2,896 player field to the final table, only to be frozen out in 5th out of 7th place. As Herbert tweeted at the time:

“5/7 2896 in the big $2.20 on stars. We haven’t played a hand for 35 minutes and have no clue when we will again. We have played for 9hrs not good.”

PokerStars Rolls All Tournaments Forward

In the event of such incidences, PokerStars has a official cancellation policy in place by which tournaments are either rolled back or rolled forward depending on which stage of play the tournament was at when the disruption occurred. In a rollback, all previous tournament action is basically wiped clean, and players’ buy-ins and entry fees are subsequently refunded, while a roll forward typically occurs after the money bubble has burst, and
the tournament’s remaining prize pool is subsequently distributed according to the players’ standing when the freeze took place.

For the latest occurrence, PokerStars chose a combination of the two options based on the criteria already mentioned, and for those tournaments that had not yet reached the money the players were refunded their tournament rake, knockout bounties where appropriate, and an equal share of the remaining prize pool. Players in the remaining tournaments received a proportion of the prize pool money according to their chip count at the time, and as PokerStars’ ring game manager Baard Dahl, explained:

“Normal service has been restored, and tournaments that were running at the time dealing stopped have been rolled forward. Spin & Gos were rolled forward using whichever multiplier was drawn for that specific tournament.”

Network Crashes Occurring More Frequently

When PokerStars servers crashed on March 3rd, some players became concerned another government crackdown similar to Black Friday which shut down the US online poker industry in 2011 had led to the incident. Other affected players speculated that the site had been subjected to yet another deliberate hack attack like the ones which have been seen increasingly frequently of late. According to PokerStars, however, the interruption in service was caused by purely “technical problems”. Nevertheless, here are some of the major network crashes to have occurred over the past six months:

September 13, 2014: Partypoker’s Garden State Super Series $1,000 Main Event cancelled due to technical difficulties.

November 2, 2014: Svenska Spel‘s Swedish Masters tournament cancelled and 1,451 players refunded their tournament buy-ins. As a Svenska Spel statement explained at the time: “We have had a number of DDoS attacks last week, that went on into the evening. “At first, we paused the tournament, but then we noticed that the attack started again, so we decided to cancel it.”

November 23, 2014: Carbon Poker Online Poker Series targeted by hackers leading to network servers crashing.

December 16, 2014: Winning Poker Network experiences cyber attack and “Winning Millions” tournament cancelled after 5.5 hours of play.

March 2, 2015: PokerStars site crashes for two hours due to ‘technical difficulties.’