The Betfair betting exchange is a complex beast and processes millions of transactions a day in Betfair trade. The odd outage has been part of the Betfair exchange landscape over the years, but in the light of what seems to be an increasing number of Betfair outages and issues during 2019, I thought it was worth doing a brief blog on how you can often avoid being caught out altogether, or at the very least minimise any potential damage.
Betfair API status
The first thing to note is that Betfair does have a page where you can check on how the API is performing. You can view that page on the following link: –
https://status.developer.betfair.com
The problem you have on this page is that it is a reactive measure. You tend to be alerted to Betfair API issues after they have happened. It can be useful to visit this page if you see something odd and want to check the exchange API. There was an issue recently where there were delays to the ‘/
Anticipating Betfair API issues
The problem with the Betfair status page, as I stated above, is that it’s reactive. You really need to know if something is about to happen. Fortunately, help is at hand.
Very rarely does the Betfair API completely crash out of the blue, instead, you’ll usually find it slowly grinds to a halt. Some of the early warning signs you’ll see are things like bets being slow to appear in the market or slow to be removed when cancelled, general stickiness where Betfair odds aren’t updating at the rate they should or in the case of the most recent outage users balances not updating after bets had been matched.
Most of the time you’ll see something like the above, but it will then return to normal after a short period. But as we’ve seen too many times already this year it can often be a precursor to some more serious where the API eventually crashes or Betfair suspend all markets (without warning) while they fix the problem.
Anticipating that Betfair have issues
So where do you get the fastest information? Quite simply the fastest and most reliable information is from other traders who are actively trading the markets.
Thanks to the Bet Angel forum being by far the busiest of all Betfair trading community, there is no shortage of full and part-time traders actively trading the markets around the clock that will immediately post on the dedicated Betfair Down thread as soon as any issues are spotted.
It’s these early warnings from real traders who are active in the market and who have posted to this thread who have helped save me on several occasions, including this latest outage where I was waiting to open a position on a Tennis market until I saw the messages flood onto the Betfair down thread, I then held back and within 15-20mins of the first messages appearing – bang! Betfair suspended all markets and they stated like that for around half an hour. Without seeing the messages from other traders I would almost certainly of been caught with open positions I couldn’t close.
Following any Betfair outage it’s then always painful for me to see others comment on the thread and twitter later on how they’ve been caught out and incurred losses, some of them very big and through no fault of their own. Each time I’m left thinking to myself ‘If only you’d seen the posts on the thread earlier’ or the tweet’s Peter is always quick to put out a warning of potential Betfair issues. Over the year the comments on this thread and the tweets you see, not only help you anticipate outages, but they also shine a light on who is really trading out there.
Get instant alerts to Betfair issues
The Bet Angel Betfair trading forum is a useful
By bookmarking the Betfair Down thread on the Bet Angel forum, you can then configure it to send out an email alert the instant anyone posts to it, even if you’re not logged into the forum at the time.
Even if you’re running automation and are not at your trading desk receiving an email alert on your mobile could give you enough time to get onto your VPS or wherever you’re running the automation from to take the necessary steps.
Setting up a Betfair Outage Email Alert
First, open the Betfair Down thread and click the ‘Spanner’ icon at the bottom of the page and click ‘Bookmark topic’.
Next click on your forum user name and select ‘User Control Panel’. When on your ‘User Control Panel’ page select ‘Board Preferences’ > ‘Edit Notifications Options’ and tick the box shown below to receive an email when someone posts in the bookmarked topic.
You will now receive an email whenever anyone posts to that thread, for traders already at there PC having an instant notification of a potential Betfair issue they can decide what action to take if any depending on how.
For automated traders or if your away from your PC depending on the content of the message you may want to log on to your VPS or where ever your running your automation from and pause it.
