Did Super Bowl bets cause Venmo to crash?
It looks like paying off all those Super Bowl 50 bets might have been enough to overwhelm the popular mobile payment app Venmo. After the Denver Broncos beat the Carolina Panthers Sunday night, Venmo ran into some trouble. The company took to Twitter to let users know that it was experiencing "some slowness."
Our payments are experiencing some slowness but we're working hard on a fix. Hang tight! #sb50
— Venmo (@venmo) February 8, 2016
About two hours later, the service was back up and running.
"Last night, we experienced a temporary disruption in service due to high volume, which prevented some users from being able to use Venmo," Venmo communications lead Adrianne Wright, wrote in an email to CBS News. "Our engineers worked to address the issue as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, we encouraged all Venmo users to follow our Twitter handle (@Venmo) for updates. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Venmo allows users to transfer money with a few taps of the screen, making it easy to pay personal debts or split bills with friends. In this case, high demand may have had something to do with millions of Super Bowl bets getting settled.
During the outage, some users took to Twitter to vent their frustrations.
It makes me really happy that venmo went down immediately after the superbowl. Guess I'm not the only degenerate
— Philip Hatje (@Hatchman31) February 8, 2016
LOL Venmo is down right now because everyone is paying up their bets
— Danny Liang (@dannytaughtme) February 8, 2016
Wright added that it's unusual for Venmo to experience these kinds of disruptions but that the company normally sees a lot of app activity around "major social events, like the Super Bowl, as well as the November/December holiday season."