Betfair Down / Betfair site crash

[Crumpets]

I do. But today was an exchange issue.

It's comforting to hear that 1 hour outages rarely happen, but still...the losses of an open trade would be severe

[Crumpets]

Also, a sudden loss of a few grand can't so easily be replaced.

Large deposits these days can trigger account closures/suspensions, especially after prior big losses (unlucky outage)

[Dublin_Flyer]

Paddy Power were down at the same time I heard. I know they have the same ownership as BF but I thought they'd have the 2 infrastructures/systems kept separate so if one went down the other was safe, standard business continuity kinda thing.

I remember for years the PP website and a few others would go down on Grand National and Gold Cup day which was always blamed on the increased interest in the races overloading the servers. Always sounded more like a DDOS ransom attack to me, it never happened during big footy tournaments or at the start of August when multiple football leagues were kicking off on the same day and you'd expect huge interest from regular punters.

[jamesedwards]

What scares me is the potential lack of clarity with your current position. Is it open? Is it shut?

So if you try to hedge a position on another exchange, you run the risk of greatly increasing your loss if the original exchange position was closed

Does anybody have any means to mitigate/get around this?

Or is it a case of just letting it ride and accepting what comes? And if that is the case, how common are big outages like this per calendar year?

Thanks

If you are 'TRADING'/B2L/L2B think of it as just a 'hazard' of the job
( bit like going up and down a ladder if you are a window cleaner )

If you are straight 'BACK'/'LAY' betting - no prob

Losing a couple of thousands because of an outage during an open LtB is the issue.

I appreciate what you mean about 'hazards of the job', but how can one be so flippant about losing that kind of money?!

I accept that these things even out over the long term, but freak losses are more easily smoothed out with automated strategies (lower individual liabilities) than they are in manual strategies (greater liabilities)

I think I'm coming to accept that's it's unfortunately a case of "swings and roundabouts", but I don't understand how everyone seems so calm about these things.

Is there really nothing to be done to mitigate? I can't believe big money manual traders don't have some backup strategies to deal with this

I'm prepared for loss of connection and laptop issue, but have no idea how to respond to today if it occurred again; if ringing up is pointless, and hedging elsewhere could potentially increase total losses

The Betfair Exchange infrastructure is a creaking mess, probably held together with plenty of rubber bands, sticky back plastic, and hairy string. The older hands here have lived through many an outage and have learnt that frustration is just a waste of good energy. To be fair, severe outages like today have been much less frequent in the last year or so.

There are a few things you can do to try and protect yourself:
> Learn to look out for the early warning signs and bail out before the whole site goes down. Often you will spot little things going wrong a few minutes before a crash, like strange prices sticking/appearing/vanishing, or perhaps slow loading of markets on the Betfair site.
> Subscribe to this thread. You'll notice that the first few posts on this thread today were from 4.15pm which was a full 10 mins or so before the site was taken down. You can set alert for this thread so you get an email notification.
> Outages are more likely during periods of heaviest load. Between 3pm and 5pm on a Saturday is a serious hotspot because you have all the UK football in-play plus the biggest horse racing of the week. If you're really that worried then you could avoid or reduce exposure during this time.
> Outages do tend to come in packs sometimes. I bit like earthquakes and aftershocks, I imagine the chance of another occurrence in the next couple of weeks will be higher than normal.

[Crumpets]

If you are 'TRADING'/B2L/L2B think of it as just a 'hazard' of the job
( bit like going up and down a ladder if you are a window cleaner )

If you are straight 'BACK'/'LAY' betting - no prob

Losing a couple of thousands because of an outage during an open LtB is the issue.

I appreciate what you mean about 'hazards of the job', but how can one be so flippant about losing that kind of money?!

I accept that these things even out over the long term, but freak losses are more easily smoothed out with automated strategies (lower individual liabilities) than they are in manual strategies (greater liabilities)

I think I'm coming to accept that's it's unfortunately a case of "swings and roundabouts", but I don't understand how everyone seems so calm about these things.

Is there really nothing to be done to mitigate? I can't believe big money manual traders don't have some backup strategies to deal with this

I'm prepared for loss of connection and laptop issue, but have no idea how to respond to today if it occurred again; if ringing up is pointless, and hedging elsewhere could potentially increase total losses

The Betfair Exchange infrastructure is a creaking mess, probably held together with plenty of rubber bands, sticky back plastic, and hairy string. The older hands here have lived through many an outage and have learnt that frustration is just a waste of good energy. To be fair, severe outages like today have been much less frequent in the last year or so.

There are a few things you can do to try and protect yourself:
> Learn to look out for the early warning signs and bail out before the whole site goes down. Often you will spot little things going wrong a few minutes before a crash, like strange prices sticking/appearing/vanishing, or perhaps slow loading of markets on the Betfair site.
> Subscribe to this thread. You'll notice that the first few posts on this thread today were from 4.15pm which was a full 10 mins or so before the site was taken down. You can set alert for this thread so you get an email notification.
> Outages are more likely during periods of heaviest load. Between 3pm and 5pm on a Saturday is a serious hotspot because you have all the UK football in-play plus the biggest horse racing of the week. If you're really that worried then you could avoid or reduce exposure during this time.
> Outages do tend to come in packs sometimes. I bit like earthquakes and aftershocks, I imagine the chance of another occurrence in the next couple of weeks will be higher than normal.

Thanks James, that's helpful!

I've also done some digging on old threads, and there is a recommendation to put your exit orders in immediately, with SP taken.

In such an outage as yesterday, would SP have been settled correctly, thus helping reduce losses?

[Kai]

I've also done some digging on old threads

Ye it's been discussed to death in the past, like most things!

These might help : viewtopic.php?p=265583#p265583

[Lynskey888]

I'm seeing strange activity on my ladders - zeroes across a range of prices, money flashing in and out of the market over and over again. Is anyone else experiencing similar?

[sionascaig]

I'm seeing strange activity on my ladders - zeroes across a range of prices, money flashing in and out of the market over and over again. Is anyone else experiencing similar?

Now you mention it I'm seeing "0"'s in AUS racing (and the usual blanks). Can remember seeing a zero before. Other than that behaviour looks as expected..

edit - and if I put in a less than "1" bet in a blank price a zero appears... defo didn't do that before. Maybe BF changed something?

[Lynskey888]

I thought what I was seeing was the prelude to another crash. The money appearing then instantly vanishing from the market was reminiscent of the sort of ladder activity I could see before everything shut down on Saturday.

Putting a sub-£1 bet into the market to try to produce a zero was a really good idea! If something has changed at BF, it seems to have happened between yesterday afternoon and evening.

I’ll see what it’s like when I turn on BA later. Hopefully back to normal.

[SpikeyBob]

I noticed this on the ladders yesterday as well, I assumed it was an API change to show that a 0 meant there was less than say 50p at that price. They did seem quite 'flashy' though sometimes at the current price (OU footy markets) as if someone was placing/removing tiny bets at those odds and was particularly noticeable at HT.

[Euler]

We changed something alongside a tweak at Betfair which had this unintended effect. So we have switched that off for the moment while we look to improve it's implementation.

[Lynskey888]

They did seem quite 'flashy' though sometimes at the current price (OU footy markets) as if someone was placing/removing tiny bets at those odds and was particularly noticeable at HT.

The Atleti vs Espanyol correct score market behaved similarly.

We changed something alongside a tweak at Betfair which had this unintended effect. So we have switched that off for the moment while we look to improve it's implementation.

Cheers! Glad to see a return to normal today.

[Euler]

16:13 not Inplay?

[jamesedwards]

16:13 not Inplay?

Yes. But just human error I think?

[Euler]

Yes