You may have noticed that some of your favourite bingo sites were inaccessible for a few hours yesterday and wondered what had happened. At around 1pm yesterday afternoon, a huge fire broke out at Gibraltars main power station, and left thousands of residents and businesses without power. Gibraltar’s low taxes have lured twenty six gaming operators to the rock, with many of their offices located near to the explosion, which is said to have been caused by a mechanical failure.
Brands affected by the blast included William Hill, Ladbrokes, BetFred, Stan James and Betfair, and it was said to have cost them millions in lost revenue on one of the busiest days on the gambling calendar. Luckily no one was hurt, but a spokesman for the Gibraltar government said “the blaze interrupted Gibtelecom services, bringing down worldwide betting services” before going on to praise the emergency services for their response after power was restored.
Graham Sharpe speaking on behalf of William Hill said “its services were disrupted for about two and a half hours. It’s just one of those freak events nobody could have predicted. There will be those who will claim they would have backed a winner but there will be others who have been saved from backing a loser.”
Ladbrokes said “We apologise to the customers who were affected by the loss of some of those services on Sunday afternoon and we have been working hard to successfully to restore these, None of our staff were affected by the incident, and no customer data was compromised during that period,”.
BetFred were hardest hit by the outage and their site was still down six and a half hours later. Some players were still reporting problems this morning with the mobile version of their site appearing online instead of their usual website.
