Verizon Outage Costing Online Poker Players

Imagine being seated at a poker table, playing in a tournament where you’ve spent hours protecting your chip stack, waiting for the perfect hand to make your move. That hand finally comes, and just as you prepare to push your stack, or a substantial part of it into the pot, the lights go out.  You freeze up, nervously questioning the problem. When the lights finally come back on, you find that the tournament has carried on without you. Your hand and invested chips are gone.

This is exactly what countless Verizon users in Virginia and North Carolina went through yesterday while attempting to play online poker on a wireless device. Maybe they didn’t all have the perfect hand lined up, but their service, poker games and account access were interrupted none the less.

The Verizon outage was reported as thousands of online poker players went running for their desktop computers to restore their poker sessions before being eliminated from a tournament, or kicked off their cash game table due to inactivity.

Shortly after the problem was reported, a Verizon spokesperson told WTKR “Verizon Wireless is aware of the issue and our crews are addressing it.

It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that Verizon finally restored service to its mobile users. Melanie Ortel, another spokesperson for the wireless company, informed The Huffington Post, “Service was restored at 3:50 pm this afternoon. The issue was based in Hampton Roads and the surrounding area. One online poker player from Virgina, who chose to remain anonymous, said, “I was right in the middle of a tournament today when the service went out, and that is going to be a problem if it happens in the future.”

Interruptions in the ability to play online poker have become all to frequent in recent weeks. It wasn’t very long ago that Bank of America underwent system maintenance that left a multitude of online poker players unable to access their accounts. Without the ability to deposit, many online poker players were sorely affected.

The Verizon outage comes on the heels of the company’s highly anticipated release of the iPhone for Verizon users. With the iPhone, users can access their favorite websites a lot easier, including online poker sites. Considering recent developments, however, online poker fans may be reassessing their desire to stay with the Verizon network.