FanDuel is working diligently on ameliorating some of the technical issues that led to a series of unplanned outages with the company’s mobile betting app during the opening weekend of the NFL Playoffs, CEO Matt King told Sports Handle.
On two occasions over the weekend, temporary glitches related to the app prevented some users from placing wagers in a timely fashion. Ahead of Wild Card Weekend, a team of FanDuel technicians worked on significantly expanding user capacity leading up to the playoffs, but the company fell victim to higher than anticipated demand.
“I want to underscore this is the number one issue for us,” King told Sports Handle on the sidelines of a panel appearance at CES 2020 in Las Vegas. “We strive to give the best player experience day in and day out. It’s not acceptable what happened last weekend and we’re working to fix it as quickly as we can.”
Wild Card Weekend bottleneck
FanDuel appeared to experience a bottleneck on Saturday evening near the end of the first AFC Wildcard Game, a 22-19 overtime win by the Houston Texans over the Buffalo Bills. User traffic peaked in between games, as bettors who logged out of their accounts during the Texans’ contest attempted to log back in before kickoff of the Patriots-Titans nightcap.
Our engineers are currently working to resolve some technical issues with our Sportsbook app. As a result, some users may be temporarily unable to log in. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll follow up with more information shortly.
— FD Customer Support (@FanDuel_Support) January 5, 2020
As a result, some FanDuel users were unable to login to the app during the critical betting period, according to FanDuel’s customer support Twitter page. The issue was fully resolved in less than two hours. A day later, some users in New Jersey reportedly encountered a separate issue when the screen on their iOS devices froze up.
Some iOS users in NJ have reported that they are frozen on the page in the attached image. If you’re experiencing this issue, please uninstall and reinstall your FanDuel Sportsbook app. Sorry for the inconvenience. pic.twitter.com/dSvbfhMlsV
— FD Customer Support (@FanDuel_Support) January 5, 2020
When asked on how many users suffered unplanned outages during Wild Card Weekend, King declined to elaborate.
At present, FanDuel’s team is working on a series of five to 10 work items in their tech stack to relieve the capacity constraints, according to King. The improvements are aimed at modifying the FanDuel Sportsbook’s app architecture to increase its ability to manage more concurrent users.
Cloud computing
King made the comments at the Consumer Electronics Show, a week-long event that is widely viewed as the world’s largest tech trade show. Earlier on Tuesday, King served as a panelist on a conference session on the future of sports betting.
In many respects, top sportsbook operators such as FanDuel are constrained somewhat by requirements of the Federal Wire Act, King explained. Last June, a New Hampshire Federal Court ruled that the Wire Act only applies to interstate sports gambling, months after the U.S. Justice Department reversed a 2011 formal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel.
As long as the Wire Act is in place, sports betting data on a cloud software platform ostensibly can not be transmitted across state lines. A top cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services, which operates a facility in Herndon, Va. (Fairfax County), can typically service the entire East Coast from one large data center. Due to constraints from the Wire Act, if a sportsbook operator like FanDuel partners with a cloud provider to expand its mobile capabilities, the company likely would need to ringfence an entire state first.
While FanDuel is working with a few companies on a potential solution, there are still significant Research & Development challenges in implementing the cutting-edge technology, King indicated.
“This is a different world for them,” King said.
King did not set a timetable for when the changes with FanDuel’s app architecture will be fully completed but emphasized that the company is working as quickly as possible.
“We recognize this is a huge pain point for people,” he said. “It is not what our customers expect from us and not what we expect from ourselves, so we’ll fix it.”
