"Service Unavailable"

Was the message displayed on Betfair yesterday at around five o'clock or so. I myself had been dabbling in a little bit of experimental trading, with £2 stakes only and noticed the Betfair site go down during the second half of the Asian Cup game I was trading on. This made me think about how bad the possible consequences of the site going down whilst in-play could have on some of the major traders out there. Think you may be trading in the thousands and then all of sudden the sites down and you can't trade out your position. Well there is the possibility of using bookmakers accounts to hedge your bets, but this is obviously not ideal especially if someone deals primarily on Betfair.

Okay i'm probably not alone with my Betfair bashing here. But I really do think it's time they improved their service, i'm no technical expert but surely back-up servers and systems should be easy to implement for a site accessed all over the world which sees millions upon millions of pounds pass through it each day. I think there was around five or six football games actually in-play and on Betfair live video when the site went down, that leaves a lot of people and particularly traders in open positions which should really happen.

The liquidity on Betfair is unrivalled with other exchanges hence why it is by far and away the most popular betting exchange. People always seem to suggest a major migration to Betdaq or the purple one, in protest of such flaws in services from Betfair. But I somehow doubt that will ever happen, we can only hope that Betfair gets its act together for the sake of fairness. I only lost £2 as a result, but my attitude would have been just the same had my intended trade bet gone onto win. It's not the fact that the bet lost, it's the fact that Betfair's site went down with so many in-play markets running that was the major issue. I feel for people who where adversely effected by this service downtime, you won't get any compensation from Betfair just a worthless apology. Although I agree Betfait can only settle the markets as appropriate in such cases, voiding markets would just cause further outrage. The main point is that the site shouldn't go down with in-play betting advertised, if you can't guarantee the reliability of the site then don't offer in-play betting. Rant over.