I was very confused by what happened as it happened.Jukebox wrote: ↑Thu Aug 16, 2018 9:35 pmBetfair goes down and some people got stuck with an open position they could do nothing about - the risk is always there and we can't say we aren't aware of the risk as Betfair have not been unclear in their terms.
But now we have an extra dimension as some bets were matched during the outage (I'm not meaning Keep in Play bets)- how did these get matched? Were Betfair's own traders unaffected by the outage? Who matched my open bet at 15:07 (Time recorded by Betfair as Matched Time) when all contact was lost before then? The 15:10 was off at 15:10:14 (according to Sporting Life) so it wasn't a failure to suspend and an early off.
I started off by placing a Lay bet on the Fav. I immediately realised that something was wrong because although the one-click interface indicated that my bet was placed the balance of my bank didn't decrease accordingly as it should. So then I traded out for what would be break even but this time neither the one-click nor my balance showed any change. So I assumed it hadn't gone through... so I tried to place the same trade again... again no indication of anything happening so I just gave up trying and had to accept that I would lose my initial stake if the horse won.
Once things were back up again I signed back in and saw that my balance had increased. My initial lay bet and both my attempts at trading out had actually gone through so I had one lay bet and two back bets on the winning horse all at approx the same price. So I was very lucky. I'd got matched on everything I'd done even though the interface was, to all appearances, totally frozen.
I'm glad I had the sense to step back after two (seemingly failed) shots at trying to trade out though. Anyone who kept on trying to click, thinking their bets were not being matched when they actually were, could easily have ended up very exposed indeed.