Hi,
Between 01:00 ET and 01:30 ET on June 16 we received complaints from players regarding issues they were experiencing connecting to our game servers. These issues occurred for some players while they were deep in tournaments, including on the final table of our weekly $50K MTT. We immediately escalated this issue to our technical team for an investigation. Shortly thereafter, we learned the affected players were able to reconnect. Unfortunately, affected players in tournaments were paying blinds while they were disconnected and in some cases were blinded-out of their events.
After a thorough investigation across our systems for any possible internal factor that could have disrupted game play, we confirmed this was not due to any internal factors. This finding was substantiated both by a clean systems health check and the view that the overwhelming majority of players online during the period of this disruption were unaffected.
We then took a holistic view towards considering what external factors could have affected our players’ connections. We learned that the same Internet Service Provider was being used by all affected players during this outage, and that players using other ISPs did not experience these issues. We were unable to confirm with the ISP precisely what the problem was – as they would not confirm this to us unless we were their customer – but supplementary research from social media outlets shows that many of their customers at this time were experiencing problems across a range of websites and digital services during this same time.
This issue affected players seated in several ongoing tournaments, including 3 of the 4 last remaining participants on the final table of the Sunday $50K tournament. The end result was that the 3 disconnected players were unable to resume their connection before the tournament finished.
We regret the negative impact on game play, yet we have decisively concluded that the disconnection issue originated beyond our servers and our games remained running properly with the majority of players connected and playing. As such, this incident is covered by our
Disconnection and Cancellation Policy.
We have offered affected players some goodwill credit, but will not be providing anything further.
Regards,
Party Rep