Poker Writer
Cloudflare, which powers content delivery and cybersecurity for a significant fraction of the internet’s websites, encountered severe disruptions Tuesday morning. The technical issues affected a broad spectrum of industries including the online casino and poker world. The sweepstakes and cryptocasino sectors appeared to be the most impacted.
For the most part, most real-money online casinos and online poker sites seemed unaffected.
Bet365 was a notable exception, as its front page displayed a “you’re blocked” message for most of the morning, leaving users unable to access the site.
Multiple sweepstakes sites suffered similar effects, including:
- McLuck
- Pulsz
- Sidepot
- Stake.us
Stake’s international cryptocasino site was also affected.
Cloudflare reported that the difficulties were “mostly resolved” by 9:30 a.m. ET.
Impact on Poker Sites
Stake has a sweepstakes poker product, which was the only one in that vertical to go offline amid the difficulties.
The other sweepstakes poker sites remained functioning: ClubWPTGold, Clubs Poker, and GlobalPoker.
Some sites peripheral to the poker industry likewise encountered difficulties. For instance, the Global Poker Index displayed “internal server error” messages for several hours, even after the issue was resolved elsewhere.
Other informational and affiliate sites such as Hendon Mob, Card Player, and PokerNews stayed up and running throughout.
Larger Impact
The Cloudflare disruption had global impact, beginning at roughly 6:30 a.m. ET. The outage lasted about three hours, though some sites started functioning intermittently after two. According to DownDetector, several of the most popular sites in the world had outages during that same time window on Tuesday.
X was the most prominent social media platform disrupted, with hardly any new posts appearing for the morning of November 18. New posts were unable to load for large parts of Tuesday. Even when the site was accessible, the posts showing up were mainly from the previous day.
There were also reports of ChatGPT going down and being unusable for hours.
Practical delivery sites such as Amazon and Doordash also reported wide outages.
