On August 16, FanDuel customers got a heads-up when they logged on:
It might have seemed like odd timing, especially since major sports were on hiatus from mid-March through July. August brought back the familiar options of MLB, NBA and NHL to PA online sportsbooks.
A full slate of action was scheduled for August 17. Early games included Tampa Bay facing off against Columbus at 3 p.m. The Cardinals and Cubs played at 4:15. The main event was a quadruple-header to start the NBA Playoffs which started at 1:30 p.m. with the Utah Jazz vs. Denver Nuggets.
FanDuel’s Director of Publicity Kevin Hennessy commented on the timing of the upgrades:
“Pennsylvania and New Jersey was the final stage in a series of these migrations. We completed West Virginia and Indiana earlier in the year. An upgrade like this takes months to prepare. Our engineering teams have worked tirelessly to get ready for Sunday and Monday. Unfortunately, we ran into issues that prolonged the outage.”
FanDuel down, Twitter ire commences
FanDuel tweeted at 1 p.m. on Monday that their “platform upgrades” were continuing. They added that any customer who was affected by the outage and lost money on previously submitted entries for the day’s impacted contests will have their net losses refunded. The large majority were PA and NJ users.
Sportsbook users took to Twitter to express their displeasure over the timing of the upgrade and the delays.
FanDuel PA and NJ platform upgrades
The key purpose of FanDuel’s platform upgrade was migrating account and wallet functions in order for customers to have a single login and one wallet. FanDuel users in Pennsylvania and New Jersey will now have one login and wallet for their FanDuel sportsbook, online casino and DFS accounts. Winnings are also accessible across products. In addition, there is a single view of balances, transaction history and game play.
“The user experience of our platforms have been significantly improved for customers that choose to play on multiple products,” said Hennessy.
Hennessy said a small number of users in Pennsylvania and New Jersey with both fantasy and sportsbook accounts require additional security to fully merge their accounts.
“As a result, some of these users did not see their up-to-date account in our fantasy interface. To be clear, all user information, balances, pending bets and contest entries are secure and up to date. We expect to fully verify and update the account interface of users affected in this manner very soon.”
Logging in
When logging into FanDuel, here is what you may see now: