Online sports betting apps missed out on some action on Thursday night because of a problem with their geolocation services.
Geolocation services check your location every time you use an online sportsbook.
In other words, the service is what checks to make sure that you’re actually in a legal betting state like Indiana when you log onto your favorite betting app.
Thursday’s outages came in the middle of Thursday Night Football.
DraftKings, FanDuel sportsbook outages in Indiana
The geolocation outages hit a handful of states around the country.
In Indiana, the downtime took out DraftKings and FanDuel, the state’s two most popular sportsbooks.
Other states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Oregon also had one or more sportsbooks left in limbo by the incident.
The timing wasn’t great, considering that all of this happened in the middle of an NFL game.
Since the NFL is the most popular league for betting in the US, sportsbooks obviously don’t want any interruption to their services while games are taking place.
GeoComply is the company that handles all of the geolocation for DraftKings and FanDuel.
The company’s technical troubles left customers unable to bet, cash out or do anything else on their affected sportsbook accounts.
FanDuel was quick to spread the word about the outage.
We are aware that some users are currently experiencing trouble verifying their location when using the Sportsbook platform. Our team is working to resolve this as soon as possible, and we will provide updates here as they happen. We apologize for any inconvenience!
— FD Customer Support (@FanDuel_Support) October 23, 2020
Exactly one hour after, DraftKings tweeted out a similar message, and the company followed up saying that everything was back to normal.
This issue has now been resolved. We appreciate you sticking with us here! https://t.co/LnT7rIkX1h
— DraftKings CX Team (@DK_Assist) October 23, 2020
The issues were all sorted out by the time the fourth quarter of the game came around, so thankfully customers weren’t locked out of everything for long.
GeoComply problems
Since GeoComply works with so many sportsbooks around the country, any kind of service interruption can cause major problems.
A spokesperson for the company confirmed that Thursday’s outage came from their end of things, rather than from the sportsbooks themselves.
“Last night we encountered an unexpected network communications error, which our team responded to and remedied immediately. We have alerted all affected clients and they are aware of the issue and the steps that were taken to resolve it as quickly as possible. The incident was a completely isolated internal network issue and in no way was it a cybersecurity vulnerability.”
Clarifying that all of this took place internally is a key part of that statement.
Companies that handle personal data like FanDuel and DraftKings need everything to be secure.
Both companies were the targets of a ransomware attack just last week.
The duo is surely glad that Thursday’s speed bump was just a technical problem this time around, but any outage is still less than ideal.
Hopefully it is smooth sailing from here on out.
