How often do casino platforms go down for maintenance?
How frequently do the major online casinos crash? Is there a pattern in how often they crash? Do they crash only during peak hours (which I have noticed)? How long does an average crash last? We are collecting data on this issue to include as part of our wiki and forums, so please feel free to comment.
5 Answers
In my experience, reputable online casinos try to keep that downtime to a minimum, and they always try to schedule maintenance after business hours. I never expect to see regular outages throughout the day, maybe one every few weeks at most. But during high-traffic times and around holiday events and other special occasions, the network can become unstable, and it is possible that the casino has suffered a server crash. In most cases, it’s probably because of unexpected high demand, not planned maintenance. When they happen, server crashes last about half an hour to an hour, depending on the cause. Major casinos almost always have back-up servers, so if you experience crashes several times a week, it probably means that the casino you’re playing at is not as solid as you’d want. If you find patterns (for example, crashes during their biggest promotions), these could tell you something about the casino’s technical capacity. The more data you collect, the clearer the trend will become. But don’t forget to factor in the reputation of the casino and its software platform while making sense of the data.
The majority of Internet casinos perform maintenance once every few weeks, typically two or four times a month. While an actual server crash is highly unusual at major gaming sites, small glitches may occur from time to time. If your site is down when you know others are playing, it might be a coincidence – though I have witnessed traffic surges cause downtime in the past. If, indeed, there is a crash or outage, the average time is about 10-30 minutes. Most casinos will post information on their website’s Facebook page or support portal as soon as possible. There is no set schedule for these events, but reputable casinos know that uptime is crucial for player retention.
Most big online casinos are fairly reliable, although there’s occasional maintenance (typically 1-2 times a month on weeknights). Crashes are very infrequent, except when the servers get overloaded. But if so, they will only last up to 10-30 minutes. The big software providers: Playtech and Microgaming have near perfect records b/c they have redundant systems. If you see crashes happening more than that at peak hours, there is another reason for it; either the site is not big enough or CDN problems with ISPs in your region. Gather uptime reports from independent sources (e.g. pingdom) and forum discussions for reliable data sources. Let us know what you find!
Big-brand casinos don’t crash – they’re designed for continuous operation. They go down only when doing maintenance. This is almost always done during off-peak hours (in the late evening or early morning). Being down for a couple of hours is normal. If your casino seems to be crashing during prime time, something’s wrong. Have a backup casino or two on hand just in case.
Don’t worry too much about the major casinos. They rarely have downtime, except when they take them offline for scheduled maintenance (typically in the middle of the night). Unplanned crashes are almost always caused by excessive traffic or technical glitches (though these occur more frequently during peak hours, which casino operators try to avoid). They can last anywhere between a few minutes to no longer than an hour. Keep track of scheduled downtime (usually overnight), as well as unscheduled system failures (which generally differ significantly between platforms).