US-facing online sportsbook BetOnline was knocked offline last weekend by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, as the scale of these attacks grows to previously unimaginable heights.

On Friday, BetOnline account holders began reporting that they could no longer access the site. While BetOnline’s official Twitter feed insisted the company’s IT team was working to remedy the “network issues,” the site remained offline for a couple days, leaving the site’s customers venting all manner of expletives in gambling forums.

On Monday, BetOnline management shared a statement with the SBR forum, indicating that the outage was the result of “an attempt by a third party to disrupt traffic and site access,” confirming many account holders’ suspicions that the site was undergoing a sustained DDoS attack.

Online gambling sites, particularly sports betting sites that depend on time-specific events, have long topped the list of targets favored by DDoS attackers. Poker sites’ well-publicized tournament schedules are also tempting targets, and while we take PartyPoker at its word that its unplanned downtime last Sunday was due to a ‘server malfunction,’ one may never know for sure whether or not the issue was the result of external actors.