Betfair-a shambles of a service

jonnygiles

Hey there for the third time in recent months Betfair website has crashed leading many people trading in running on live events to lose vast amounts of money due to the lack of competency of the website administrators to manage internet traffic. I have written a complaint on the matter to the administrators and was told in response

Unfortunately we are unable to reimburse you for any bets you were unable to place during this outage. We understand that many Betfair customers look to trade on bets, however this cannot always be guaranteed due to unforeseen circumstances such as site outages.

In such occasions such as these you could expect bookmakers to give some sort of a goodwill gesture in offer to keep customers happy, however the opposite appears to be occurring here. The sheer lack of respect the online company are showing is quite shocking. Indeed I found an article in the Betfair Forum after the second crash dated 13th March 2011 http://community.betfair.com/service/go/thread/view/94166/27238661/apology-and-an-explanation relating to two earlier crashes that occurred that says

We've fixed this problem now. We've disabled the original automated job and rebuilt it to update content safely. We've tripled the capacity of our web server farm to spread our load even more thinly. We've fixed our process for disabling features so that we won't make things worse. We've updated our operational processes and introduced a whole new raft of monitoring to spot this type of issue. We've also isolated the underlying web server issue so that we can change our content at will without triggering the switch to single-threading.

The simple fact of the matter is that no they havent fixed this problem, no they dont seem to have tripled the capacity of their web server and no it doesnt seem as though they have updated their disabling features whatsoever. Id advise everybody to stop using Betfair website for trading as the site could be susceptible to further crashes at any time.

I would just like to know what others think of Betfairs service in the past few months. I will be closing my account with them

King Kenny

Betfair are not bookmakers I'm afraid.

jonnygiles

ok sorry online gambling service, is that the correct term so? straying away from the point here

ValueSeeker

If it ain't broke don't fix it. It was fine before they started changing everything. I had 1 bad weekend with it, havn't had too much trouble since but that weekend was costly.

Francesco10

Anyone have any problems withdrawing money at the minute?

quiz

No site is 100% reliable.

its like getting angry for day turning to night.

why close your account? Was it your own fault that you had your entire balance on one event?

Derek!

It sounds like hes lost money over their failure to keep the site goin on more than one occasion. I dont see how it could be his fault that their site went down and he lost money. He clearly doesnt have anything to do with how betfair is run and its unfair to suggest its his fault, hes not a psychic who can tell when the site will go down.

jonnygiles

Well when a betting website keeps providing a shoddy service and for trading purposes you dont know when the site will close down or not, i dont see any point continuing the betfair website thats all. Plus the fact that on the third time the site was closed for maintenance, the company voided all bets except on horse racing was very suspicious in my opinion. A little bit scandulous that they decided to refund guys lumping on huge bets on a 1.1 event in say snooker, while the average everyday betting trader loses out on backing a few quid on a horse with a future intention to lay it off before race time. I lost a small amount of money myself but im sure people have lost thousands over this in the last few weeks

Mellor

jonnygiles wrote: »

Well when a betting website keeps providing a shoddy service and for trading purposes you dont know when the site will close down or not, i dont see any point continuing the betfair website thats all. Plus the fact that on the third time the site was closed for maintenance, the company voided all bets except on horse racing was very suspicious in my opinion. A little bit scandulous that they decided to refund guys lumping on huge bets on a 1.1 event in say snooker, while the average everyday betting trader loses out on backing a few quid on a horse with a future intention to lay it off before race time. I lost a small amount of money myself but im sure people have lost thousands over this in the last few weeks

Their are risks with trading, site down time, power cuts, isp failure etc.
You except these risks when you decide to trade.


For every penny lost money due to not being able to trade off. There was prob an equal amount additional won, where not trading off turned a bigger profit.