Smarkets CEO says “I’m sorry” as site outage causes chaos on Cheltenham opening day
Jason Trost takes to Twitter to apologise over tech issues caused by mass influx of new users on day one of festival
Smarkets CEO Jason Trost has apologised to customers after serious tech issues blighted the betting exchange on the first day of the Cheltenham Festival, rendering the site unusable.
The issues began around 9.30am on 15 March, with the Smarkets Tech Twitter page noting the site was experiencing “platform-wide technical issues which may affect your ability to log in, place bets or contact support”.
These issues continued until around 4.00pm, meaning users were unable to fully access the site on one of the busiest betting days of the year.
As the issues continued to mount, Smarkets received a swathe of tweets from disappointed users throughout the day complaining.
Following the conclusion of the disruption, Smarkets pointed to an influx of new users that was larger than expected as the core reason why the site suffered from tech issues.
In a statement, Smarkets said: “At around 9.30am this morning we started noticing technical issues on our platform that were making the website and app unstable. We immediately tried to identify and fix the problems but were unable to resolve things in a timely manner.
“Firstly, we would like to unreservedly apologise for the interruption caused on a busy betting day. We understand that apologies can feel hollow in circumstance like this; Cheltenham is our most important week of the year and one that we always plan for and look forward to.
“This year we have let our customers down, and we’re very sorry for that. We know that downtime, no matter whether it’s seconds or hours long, is completely unacceptable.”
Tweeting from his personal account, Trost said: “Today really hurt. We screwed up and I’m sorry to all affected Smarkets and SBK customers.
Today really hurt. We screwed up and I'm sorry to all affected Smarkets and SBK customers.
Everything’s now stable and we are being extra vigilant to ensure that we don't run into similar issues moving forward. https://t.co/D4HSWXHGgj
— Jason Trost (@jasontrost) March 15, 2022
“Everything’s now stable and we are being extra vigilant to ensure that we don’t run into similar issues moving forward,” he added.
Smarkets said it was working “extremely hard” to ensure these issues did not reoccur throughout the remainder of the festival.
The operator also confirmed any bets that had been placed before or during the period would be “settled accordingly”.
A Smarkets spokesperson told EGR: “Yesterday was a tough one for us as a business. We pride ourselves on having first-class products and yesterday we let our customers down. The uptake for our enhanced Cheltenham sign-up offer greatly exceeded expectations, and this was part of the reason for the downtime.
“An extended period of instability is an extremely rare occurrence for us, but we know the level of service we provided yesterday was unacceptable. Our engineers have been working tirelessly to ensure that things are stable today and throughout the rest of the week and beyond.”