PokerStars’ Sunday Million tournament is a mainstay of the online poker world drawing players from across the globe to compete for a pot that usually exceeds a million dollars. Last week, however, the tournament devolved into chaos as server problems, possibly caused by hackers, plagued the event. Making matters worse, many players complained that the company’s response to the problems were lackluster at best.
The troubles began when the tournament launched at around 1 p..m. (EST) when a large number of players were unable to connect to the PokerStars’ servers or were disconnected from them entirely. These issues were compounded by the fact that some players in Eastern European countries were, in fact allowed to be seated. When the disconnected players stopped playing, their blinds and antes went to the players who remained, while the disconnected players watched their pots dwindle down to nothing.
When the company finally noticed the problems, about an hour into the tournament, they sent out a tweet reading:
Apologies to all our players for the recent issues on PokerStars. The players affected by this morning’s issues have already been credited & we aim to refund players affected by yesterday’s problems, with their equity at the time of disconnection, within 72 hours.
Unfortunately, even that effort was plagued with problems. Many of the disconnected players who watched helplessly while their chip stacks dwindled down to nothing were incensed when the remaining players walked off with their cash.
According to a report on PokerNews.com, PokerStars is asking players who were negatively impacted by the outage to contact customer support.
While no official reason has been given for the outage, some have been speculating that the site was hit by hackers.