GeoComply outage shuts down online poker sites

A major outage by GeoComply last Thursday left several online poker players with nowhere to play.

GeoComply is a geolocation surface used by most online poker sites in the US. It determines where players are physically located which online poker sites need to know so ensure only legal players are using their sites. When GeoComply went down Thursday poker sites were unable to verify player’s locations which meant no one could log on to play or even check their profile.

When did the GeoComply outage begin?

The outage occurred around 10 p.m. eastern time on Thursday night. It was a catastrophe for online poker sites that were running tournaments at the time as several players were immediately kicked from the site and unable to log back on to continue playing. According to reports on social media the small amount of players that were not kicked we able to take full advantage and run over the rest of the table.

The outage reportedly lasted about an hour, but that was long enough for many players to be blinded out of their tournaments and the remaining players to cash in on their good fortune.

A few operators did catch on to the service interruption quick enough to protect their players. Partypoker was reportedly the first to take action, pausing all tournaments and auto settling several according to their cancellation policy.

PokerStars, which is in the middle of the annual New Jersey Championship of Online Poker in New Jersey, issued massive refunds to players who were affected by the outage.

The World Series of Poker did not take immediate action to refund customer but was expected to after releasing the following statement, ”It’s unfortunate there was a state-wide issue with one of iGaming’s critical vendors which interrupted service for most NJ online poker operators for 45 mins on Thursday night. We view it as an isolated incident and will look to process the appropriate compensation to impacted players in short order.”

GeoComply also responded to the outage, calling it an internal network issue, and not a security breach.