Leading UK Betting Site Suffers From Costly Friday Downtime

by Roy Brindley, 23 February 2026

A Cloudflare outage has caused a costly service disruption for bet365 and other UK-facing online betting sites.

Friday was a bad day in bet365’s UK head office. © Getty Images

Key Facts:

• bet365 and other UK betting sites suffered an outage on Friday.
• The culprit was the global web infrastructure provider, Cloudfire. Other businesses, including Uber, were affected.
• bet365 customers in North America and Australia took to social media to express their dissatisfaction.
• More than 5,000 complaints were lodged on the Downdetector outage-tracking site.

Online gambling colossus bet365 suffered a nightmare heading into last weekend. On Friday afternoon, shortly after peak pre-weekend sports betting activity had begun, customers attempting to access bet365 on desktop and mobiles encountered failed logins, error messages, and frozen live-betting pages.

The Stoke-on-Trent-based company, which is widely accessible in more than 100 countries across six continents, was not the only betting firm to suffer a breakdown. Flutter Entertainment, the ailing company that operates Paddy Power, Betfair, and Sky Betting, also entered a state of suspended animation.

Non-betting companies that encountered the same fate included Uber, Just Eat, Workday and a host of gaming platforms such as Counter-Strike, Steam, Call of Duty and Dota 2. The culprit was Cloudflare, the global web infrastructure provider that delivers content routing, security protection, and performance optimisation for major online platforms.

Betting Under an Expensive Cloud

Cloudflare claims around 20% of all websites use some form of its services. It last hit the headlines in November 2025, when a major Cloudflare network outage forced businesses relying on digital payments – including shops and restaurants – to switch to cash-only transactions.

With offices around the world, bet365 employs over 9,000 people, and it claims to have over 100 million customers worldwide. With its annual revenue exceeding £4 billion, any downtime is guaranteed to be expensive.

Cloudflare’s Friday outage would have cost the operator significantly more in turnover than mid-week downtime. On the evening, many irate punters unable to access their bet365 accounts, took to X to vent their frustrations.

Bet365’s X account issued a message stating: “We’re aware of an issue with our Website/App, and our Technical Team are working to resolve it as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Bet365 should compensate every customer who has lost out on cash outs over the past few hours since the website/app hasn’t been working. A company this big shouldn’t be having technical difficulties for this long. Every customer deserves compensation for any bets they had!!

— James Christie (@JamesChris55982) February 20, 2026

The message prompted many to point out that the outage was costing punters who had intended to cash out bets. Others suggested compensation should be paid to account holders with live positions that were due to mature during the downtime.

Entain Benefits From Working Site and Star Appeal

Unfortunately for the affected betting sites, the Cloudflare issues affecting UK customers were not resolved until late into the night. It meant bet365 punters wishing to get involved in the much-anticipated flat race debut of Champion Hurdle winner, Constitution Hill, at a packed Southwell were forced to bet with alternative online betting sites.

On Saturday, Simon Clare, spokesman for Entain (owner of Ladbrokes and Coral bookmakers), boasted to the Racing Post newspaper that turnover on the ITV broadcast race was “equivalent to the feature race on a Saturday afternoon, demonstrating the immense value of ‘star-appeal’ in driving consumer interest and betting on the sport.”

The story did not question if, or suggest that, Ladbrokes and Coral had benefited from rival firms’ inability to accept bets on the contest. It was convincingly won by Constitution Hill at odds of 6/4.

U.S. And Australia Also Suffer

While UK and Irish bet365 customers saw normal service returned around 9.30 pm, postings on X suggest the gambling site was down for even longer in the U.S. and Australia. As the UK entered the small hours of the morning, an avalanche of U.S. and Australian complaints appeared online.

Bet365, which operates legally in 16 U.S. States, logged more than 5,000 complaints on outage tracking site Downdetector during what was late afternoon in much of North America. Canadians were particularly vociferous, complaining they could not trade on the Olympic Games Canada/Finland ice hockey match that was taking place.

In Australia, where Ladbrokes has a larger share of the betting market than bet365, complaints about both sites continued to appear until the early afternoon local time. Being a Saturday, the chief sports betting day of the week, both firms’ downtime would have been exceptionally costly.