A series of ‘service issues’ on Wednesday left punters unable to access their Bet365 accounts on one of the busiest nights of the football season.
And the outage particularly sparked fury on those with live Champions League bets, with the customers unable to access the firm’s cash out feature.
Scores of punters have complained about the technical difficulties, with their accumulative grievances potentially costing them thousands of pounds in cashed out profits.
Going Down
The final round of Champions League action saw 18 games played simultaneously in what was one of the most chaotic nights of football of the 2024/25 season so far.
With plenty of betting interest in the outcome of those encounters, traffic to Bet365’s website and app increased exponentially – causing the outage, as the firm’s servers struggled to contend with the surge in volume.
So much so, during the second half of those Champions League games, Bet365 reported ‘issues with our service’ that led to both their site and app being down for the best part of 30 minutes.
The timing could not have been any worse, with the vast majority of football cash outs being actioned late on in games. And by the time that the issues had been fixed, many of the scored had changed – meaning that punters had lost the opportunity to lock in a profit before the markets were suspended.
It was a massive PR own goal for the company then, and one made worse by the fact that Bet365 was revealed as the Champions League’s first official betting partner by UEFA in the summer of 2024.
In a message sent to their customers, Bet365 revealed that they were ‘experiencing issues with our services and our technical team are working to resolve this as soon as possible’, although the damage had already been done.
It’s not the first time that a bookmakers’ online operations have failed in the wake of increased traffic. The Grand National, horse racing’s most bet-upon race, typically leaves a trail of downtime each year – in 2022, William Hill was down for almost two hours as casual punters tried to collect their winnings.
Bet365 also suffered another outage in the wake of the 2022 Grand National, claiming that their website and app were both experiencing ‘unprecedented levels of traffic’.
And in July 2024, Entain’s brands Ladbrokes and Coral stopped working completely for customers for almost an entire Friday as part of a global I.T. outage that saw hundreds of companies – including the NHS and many UK airports – unable to operate as normal.
What are the Rules on Cashing Out a Bet?
It’s worth remembering that any cash out offers that are live will become unavailable when the bookmaker suspends that particular game or market.
So, maybe a punter has wagered on Liverpool to beat Arsenal. They have a cash out value available, but then the market is suspended – maybe there’s a VAR check for a goal or possible red card.
For the duration of that period, the cash out will be unavailable. In the examples above, that outage might last a few seconds or a couple of minutes. But when a bookmaker’s entire system fails, they will suspend all markets until they are back up and running.
The bookies are also covered by their rulebook, which gives them the protection of being able to ‘reserve the right’ to withdraw a cash out offer at any time.
In Sky Bet’s terms and conditions, as just one example, it’s confirmed that punters aren’t afforded any protection should the firm suffer some kind of technical difficulty.
“Please note that due to unforeseen technical reasons, Cash Out may not be available at all times. Sky Bet will not be held responsible if these services are not available for technical reasons or other reasons beyond our control. Bets placed will stand regardless of the availability of Cash Out services,” Sky Bet’s T&Cs read.
Bet365, meanwhile, have a very similar set of terms and conditions, but they also have the power to strip punters of the cash out feature if they continually use it to lock in a pre-event profit through odds movement.
They will do so where they have ‘reasonable grounds to believe that the customer is misusing Cash Out by frequently using the feature to take advantage of pre-event price movements and closing their bets through the Cash Out feature before the event has started.’
So the bookies have every eventuality covered in their T&Cs when it comes to cashing out… including when technical issues force their website and/or app to be down for a period of time.