Communications outage led to tote issues at Tampa Bay Downs, officials say

The disruption on Saturday that led Tampa Bay Downs to run its most prestigious race, the Tampa Bay Derby, as a non-wagering event was caused by a communications outage between the bet-processing center at AmTote and the track, according to a joint statement from the communications provider and the parent company of AmTote.

The disruption occurred when the links maintained by Roberts Communications Network suffered outages, occurring to Roberts and 1/ST Racing, the owner of AmTote. The statement called the outages “unprecedented” and said that it took down both the primary and backup networks that are used to keep information flowing from Tampa Bay and the AmTote hub in Maryland.

“Everyone needs to stop blaming AmTote,” said Todd Roberts, the president and chief executive officer of RCN. “This was an unprecedented failure in the primary and backup connectivity provided to RCN by our third-party suppliers.”

The statement said that the disruption was “not caused by any failure in RCN equipment or operations,” but rather on the failure of the providers of bandwidth capacity to RCN.

“RCN has not yet received an official reason-for-outage report from its third-party providers specifying a reason for this failure,” the statement said. “However, it is believed that the outage, which was much broader than just the racing industry, affected at least three major telecom/internet providers in the geographic region that services the AmTote hub.”

The disruption occurred at 4:52 p.m. Eastern, just after the Florida Oaks, the race prior to the Tampa Bay Derby, had been run. The outage prevented the Tampa Bay Oaks from being priced, meaning wagers on the race could not be immediately redeemed, causing chaos among bettors at the track and at betting sites nationwide.

The outage was not able to be restored over the next hour, and the Tampa Bay Derby was run after a 39-minute delay as a “non-wagering event.” That led to the cancellation of any wagers on the race that had already been placed, with the exception of the multi-race wagers ending in the Derby, which were re-calculated on Sunday morning as if the Derby had not been run (or as if the result was an “all” for every ticket still live). Prices on the Florida Oaks were also calculated on Sunday morning.

Several other tracks were also affected by the outage, but those tracks simply faced delays in getting connectivity restored. No payouts at any other tracks were affected by the outage.

Racing’s bet-processing network is a vast web connecting betting sites throughout the U.S. to bet-processing servers, which commingle wagers from the sites into single pools and send post-race betting data back to the sites. Calculations to update betting odds occur on frequent cycles in the lead up to races, and then a final calculation is performed after a race is declared official.

The statement said that AmTote and RCN worked “throughout the night to restore service so that wagering activities could take place today as normal.” No disruptions were being reported on Sunday as of early afternoon.

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