Australian betting and lottery operator Tabcorp Holdings is apologizing to punters, investors and racing bodies after a technical outage cost the company around AU$10m in lost earnings.

Tabcorp’s TAB, Keno and Gaming Services operations went offline on Saturday morning and the retail, digital and telephone betting disruption continued through midday Sunday. The systems were shut down again Sunday evening for a full restart but were reportedly back to relatively normal by Monday morning. Tabcorp said it was doing its best to restore “optimal service levels in coming days.” 

Tabcorp issued a statement saying the outage was due to “a smoke and likely fire incident at a third-party managed data center in Sydney,” stressing that there was “no evidence” of any cyber skullduggery or threats to customer data. The data center in question was operated by Global Switch, which said “there was no fire” although “one customer had several servers and equipment affected.”

The outage could have been timed better, as it coincided with the final day of the Melbourne Cup racing carnival. The shutdown of TAB’s betting operations left many punters with no choice but to patronize so-called corporate bookmakers (Sportsbet, Bet365, etc.) although even these operations were impacted by disruptions to TAB-specific exotic wagers.