A few hours of overnight downtime for a server upgrade and reboot are almost an everyday occurence somewhere in the poker world, but at PokerStars' global dot-com client, the procedure was a little more intense. Faced with what site administrators knew would be a "big one", taking significantly longer than normal, Stars even devoted blog space to advise its players of the pending outage.
According to PokerStars, the global dot-com site might be down for as much as 24 hours while the upgrade, which appeared to involve multiple components, moved forward. PokerStars.com ceased all action just before 5:00 AM EDT | 9:00 UTC on Tuesday morning, and that expected the site could be offline for as much as 21 or 24 hours, depending on which Stars post you saw:
As it turned out, even 24 hours didn't quite cover the process. While most services were up and running within a day, it took several hours more for the site to completely re-integrate some elements for some jurisdictions, including login, deposit/withdrawal, and online-balance capabilities. PokerStars.com's companion online casino was also rendered unavailable for an additional period for many players. The upgrade involved only PokerStars' primary dot-com platform and did not include firewalled jurisdictions such as the PokerStars US sites.
Finally, after approximately 32 hours, Stars reported via its Twitter/X account that the log-in and deposit issues had been resolved, though some auxiliary work was ongoing:
Safety and reliability preeminent
PokerStars did not detail all the elements of the lengthy upgrade, though it's possible that the installation of new table themes -- as described in an earlier Stars Blog post -- was part of the process.
Graeme Fowler, Managing Director of Platform Technology for PokerStars, offered some insight as well. “The experience of our players and ensuring they have a safe and reliable place to play is our priority,“ said Fowler. “We’re always looking to make improvements to our infrastructure and networks with this in mind.
“We’re taking extra time during this release to perform some network upgrades. These will improve stability, availability, and security for our players. They will also reduce any future planned downtime ensuring a better playing experience moving forward.”
PokerStars.com also scheduled a pair of $10,000 freerolls payable in Sunday Millions tickets for today, at 12:08 ET and 18:08 (6:08 pm) ET, respectively. Those freerolls were scheduled before the downtime stretched beyond a day for some players, however, and it remains to be seen if Stars will make additional compensatory adjustments.
