The leading UK bookmaker William Hill apologised to its users after the company’s website crashed two days ago. The gambling operator explained that they suffered a cyber attack, described as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Such attacks flood their target website with traffic in order to make it stop functioning properly.
As a result of the incident, some of the operator’s customers failed to place their wagers on the Tuesday evening’s football matches of the UEFA Champions League, including the ones involving Manchester City and Arsenal F.C. The website of the leading sports betting brand was not functioning properly, with the punters being prevented from placing their bets on the Championship matches.
Yesterday, the company posted a statement, saying that the online services provided by the brand were temporarily ceased due to a third-party cyber attack. The DDoS attack continued on Wednesday afternoon regardless of the fact that the Britigh sports betting operator said their services website had been brought to action. A bit later the operator explained that actually, some of its services had been restored, but the website had not been brought to action at 100%.
William Hill apologised for the inconvenience caused to its website users and revealed that the technical teams working on the problem had succeeded to restore the functionality of the website. In addition, over the time of the attack, the operator encouraged its customers to use its mobile betting application after assuring them that the problems inflicted to its website did not involve any issues related to customers data security.
William Hill described the attack as a “sophisticated” one. According to the statement released by the sports betting operator, the incident was very similar to some distributed denial of service attacks that have been experienced by other online companies over the last few weeks. For example, several companies such as Dyn, Netflix, Reddit and Twitter, and even the online edition of the Guardian crashed after experiencing a massive cyber attack that involved thousands of infected devices connected on the Internet.
The actual harms of the outage are still to be assessed by the operator. However, considering the size of the company, as well as the fact that William Hill announced a 2016 H1 revenue estimated to £814 million, the attack could have cost the operator more than £4 million.
- Author
Olivia Cole
