| BCLC's PlayNow.com Crashes: Too Many Users |
The British Columbia Lottery Corporation's (BCLC) PlayNow.com, dubbed North America's first “government-sanctioned online casino”, was launched on Friday and, by 4pm the same day, the site crashed and is still not operational.President of BCLC, Michael Graydon, said that the great success of the website proved its undoing as PlayNow.com crashed due to being too popular: "It's been an overwhelming success with people in British Columbia to the point where we hit 100% capacity in the first day...so we decided to close the site down for a half a day, and add some new hardware and servers...”.
Vice president of corporate affairs, Kevin Gass, confirmed that their gambling site wasn't ready for the unexpected demand: “We have load-bearing servers that simply were not handling the job properly, and on that basis we made the decision (to close for maintenance).”
Residents of British Columbia spend around C$100 million (£60m) a year on online gambling, and the government were, of course, keen to keep that money in B.C. and make it taxable, hence the first legal online casino was introduced. But the creators of the site should have realised that demand would be massive as, not only do people spend that much money in online gambling per year, but there are around 2,000 unregulated online sites in B.C. Introduce a legal site and the demand should be obvious!
PlayNow.com is expected to be fully functional from tomorrow (Tuesday) after it was only meant to be closed for the rest of Friday.
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