Australia's Star Entertainment Group, operator of three casinos down under, has seen its slot machines and other electronic games go offline for at least three days after an upgrade went awry.

The outfit on Monday advised investors [PDF] that "following planned upgrades to The Star's systems in readiness for the introduction of cashless gaming, certain of The Star's systems have been disrupted due to system performance issues identified in post-upgrade testing."

"Disrupted" seems a too-kind euphemism for the incident - the investor update points out that the org has had to "switch off all Electronic Gaming Machines and Electronic Table Games in each of The Star’s three properties from 10:00pm onwards on 13 July 2024 until the issue is resolved."

July 13 was a Saturday, meaning the casino missed plenty of busy hours during which punters would otherwise have surrendered plenty of their hard-earned.

The org told investors the outage was voluntary, "to ensure compliance with relevant regulations, and to maintain the Company's commitment to safer gambling procedures." Supplier Konami was helping to sort things out.

Which took quite a lot of time. It was only on July 17 that Star Entertainment posted an update [PDF] revealing that all impacted machines had been restored to operation - although it's not certain whether or when partial capacity was restored at some earlier point.

A lengthy outage always costs organizations money. The mention of compliance explains why Star Group was willing to tolerate it: the group has had a torrid few years, in which it has been the subject of regulatory inquiries that in May 2024 concluded it was not suitable to hold casino licenses in the Australian state of New South Wales.

The most recent inquiry came to The Register's attention after it discovered a software glitch saw Star's Sydney operations give away AU$3.2 million ($2.05 million) in cash - some of it to suspected criminal figures who learned of the easy-to-exploit method that saw the casino leak lucre.

Tech that led to further non-compliance could have invited further regulatory scrutiny.

A spokesperson for Star told us the org won't comment on the nature of the issues that afflicted this upgrade. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/18/star_sydney_upgrade_fail_outage/