Every year, the Super Bowl is one of the busiest days for sportsbooks across the world, if not the busiest of them all.
While there isn’t a final number yet, the American Gaming Association (AGA) estimated that Americans were expected to wager over $4 billion on Super Bowl LV.
However, U.S. sportsbooks had trouble dealing with the traffic this year as several of them faced outages for Super Bowl 55.
There was a period on the NFL’s Super Bowl Sunday where traffic was so high that bettors couldn’t place a wager for 22 straight minutes and 30 minutes total.
In total, five noteworthy United States-based sportsbooks were affected by an outage:
- Barstool Sportsbook
- FanDuel
- DraftKings
- BetRivers
- BetMGM
Traffic began to increase fairly quickly about 90 minutes before Super Bowl LV’s kickoff and this is when bettors began having issues placing bets, whether that was because of slower loading times or a complete halt in betting.
Kambi was the Root of most Super Bowl Issues
On Wednesday, it was revealed that Kambi, a technology and platform provider, was the cause behind the Super Bowl outages.
Kambi, which provides services for DraftKings, BetRivers and Barstool Sportsbook, admitted that the issues were on their end.
Representatives from Kambi said that while Super Bowl 55 was their most-bet sporting event of all-time (three-times more than usual), the volume of wagers was NOT the cause of the outage.
Kambi CEO Kristian Nylé later announced that any issues were caused by changes in one market.
“The issue experienced prior to kickoff was related to one particular bet offer for which we increased the number of possible outcomes especially for the Super Bowl,” said Nylé. “This bet offer was the third-most popular offer on the day and, due to the extended number of outcomes, required extra technical capacities as part of our bet validation process.”
Nylé went on to add that the extra technical work caused a backlog, which made any validation take longer than usual.
He said that Kambi managed to get everything under control with a “permanent fix” nearly 10 minutes before kickoff. The hope is that any sportsbook using Kambi’s services in the future won’t have to go through this again.
However, one sportsbook that won’t be dealing with Kambi again is DraftKings, which will be switching to SBTech as a provider this year.
More Outages Outside of Kambi
While Kambi caused most U.S. sportsbook outages, other platforms that aren’t partnered with them faced issues too.
FanDuel experienced outages in Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where there were times that bettors couldn’t even log in to their accounts.
Contrary to what happened with Kambi’s services, these issues were related to the popularity of Super Bowl bets.
“Due to unprecedented demand, we are experiencing isolated service interruptions with our Sportsbook in certain markets,” FanDuel issued in a statement.
In another statement, they told bettors to wait 30 seconds before trying again if they experienced issues.
It’s worth noting that FanDuel seemed to have traffic issues a few times throughout the NFL season.
