9/6/09 - The fast-growing Cake Poker Network has been having "connectivity problems" that have resulted in serious interruption of services, the network announced on its blog over the weekend.
The announcement read:
"Over the last week, the Cake Network experienced a series of connectivity issues that has culminated in a prolonged interruption of services. We have now traced the problem to an external connectivity disruption directly impacting performance at Cake’s data center.
"We apologize for the delay in responding to players about the disruption, but until now, we didn’t have sufficient information to make an announcement. The good news is that the problem has now been identified and we have a solution which will be released shortly. Doubly important is the fact that the solution being implemented will prevent this type of occurrence from ever happening again.
"We ask for your continued patience, however, as it will take approximately four days for the issue to be completely fixed. In the meantime, we are stopping all tournament play until we can guarantee full connectivity.
"We assure all Cake Network players that there are absolutely no security or account issues. No data was compromised in any way. It was simply a matter of disrupted network connectivity. This was an external issue that had nothing to do with the Cake software or game servers.
"While Cash Games are back and running we ask for your patience as there will probably be connectivity issues over the next four days. Again, we apologize for this disruption.
"We will publish another announcement when the issue is finally resolved and the tournaments are back online.
"We sincerely thank all players for their patience in this matter and hope that you will continue to enjoy our games. We’ve worked hard to make a technically stable and high quality experience for our players on the Cake Network and are committed to making this right for all players going forward."
The tone of the announcements suggests that one reason for the disruption could be a Distributed Denial of Service assault - there have been several on Australian sportsbetting sites recently - although this is only speculation. Hopefully Cake Poker will clarify this issue once it has everything back under control.
Clearly the impact of the interruptions has been significant for tournament action to be halted, but it is worth noting that "...there are absolutely no security or account issues. No data was compromised in any way. It was simply a matter of disrupted network connectivity."
