Punters shut out as Ladbrokes and Sportsbet sites crash before Cup

The Melbourne Cup may be the race that stops a nation, but for a couple of Australia's biggest bookmakers it was a day to forget as their online platforms stopped working at a crucial time.

Any Ladbrokes customer wishing to place a bet on the Melbourne Cup was unable to use the company's website or app in the build-up to the big race, and it was a similar story for Sportsbet users.

Ladbrokes, who experienced similar problems last year, appeared to be the worst affected, while Sportsbet – which is owned by Paddy Power Betfair – reported their app was working again 45 minutes before the race's 3pm local off time.

Betfair's website crashed around an hour before the race, but the firm said they were operational again within five minutes.

Ladbrokes and Sportsbet acknowledged they had let down their customers, and unsurprisingly there was plenty of reaction on social media to the problems.

In tweets to customers Ladbrokes said it was "deeply sorry" for the issues and acknowledged that "the timing couldn’t be worse".

A similar apology was tweeted by Sportsbet, which said: "Punters, sorry we let you down. We hope you still managed to have a good Cup Day."

The financial implications of the crashes will be sizeable, and causes for them are as yet unknown.

The Melbourne Cup is billed as the race that stops a nationCredit: Robert Cianflone (Getty Images)

Putting the outages into context, betting data from last year's Melbourne Cup revealed that in the minutes before the race a peak of 850 bets a second were being placed through Sportsbet. The busiest single minute saw 26,000 bets placed.

Sean Abbott, representing software disaster recovery firm Zerto, gave a damning assessment of the problems.

Abbott is Zerto's Australia and New Zealand country manager, and he told the Australian Financial Review: "In today's always-connected world, businesses need to be available to their customers 24/7, and to experience any amount of downtime, puts a business at considerable risk, both from a reputation and financial standpoint.

"Many Sportsbet and Ladbrokes customers will have turned to competitors to place their bets this Spring Carnival. Security attacks happen. Internet outages happen. It's how Australian organisations respond to these service disruptions that is important and how quickly they get back up and running.

"Every hour of downtime costs businesses thousands of dollars and the longer the outage, the more difficult it is to recover from and regain customer trust."

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