TAB is one of the biggest betting providers in Australia, providing wagering services for thousands of punters across the country. So, when the network crashes, it is certainly a huge deal. This week, TAB’s computer system suffered a huge breakdown, and engineers spent three hours getting the network back online.
According a report in the Herald Sun, TAB’s betting business, KENO, online betting and TAB outlets were affected by the outage. The system crashed around 3pm, and IT experts did not get it back online until after 6pm. It is estimated that the company lost out on millions of dollars in bets during this time, as players could not place any bets.
A report in the Daily Telegraph stated that Australians will spend $26 billion on betting through the TAB this year. That would equal about $71 million per day and $3.9 million hour. According to these estimates, TAB lost out on at least $8.9 million over the course of the network outage. While it is only a small drop in the bucket of the millions that the company will make in 2014, it is still a large sum of money to lose in just 3 hours.
“We are as frustrated as our customers were and we apologise for the inconvenience,” says Adam Hamilton, Media Manager of TAB. “We will be doing a full investigation into what caused it and will be doing everything in our power to try to ensure it doesn’t happen”. The outage is likely to have sent players to competing bookmakers.
Companies like William Hill and Ladbrokes continue to compete with locally-owned and operated companies like Tatts and TAB, and the network crash has not done local operators any favours.
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