Investigation into tote system shutdown completed

TAB has completed an investigation into the causes of an unscheduled tote system shutdown last Friday night that gave rise to various issues including delaying the declaration of results and payouts for the last two races at the Greyville night meeting.

The unfortunate chain of events was set in motion by a power failure in Johannesburg on Friday evening. TAB’s UPS back-ups immediately kicked in, but are designed to power the tote system for a limited time only. Subsequent generator malfunctions, including starter-motor failure in a generator purchased recently, then left TAB with no option but to perform an unscheduled shutdown of the tote betting system in order to protect data integrity.

The system was restarted about an hour later after generator repairs had been carried out, but communications with international commingling partners were lost during that period and the unscheduled system shutdown also caused several software glitches.

Consequently, all international bets into commingled pools affected by the loss of links were excluded because of the loss of data integrity, with relevant pool totals diminishing accordingly.

Issues with the tote system start-up sequencing resulted in TAB’s online betting platform going down for a short period during the L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate race meeting at Kenilworth the next day. More software issues emerged on Saturday evening, which resulted in Pick 3 bets taken in South Africa on the Gulfstream Park race meeting in the USA having to be refunded.

TAB apologises for all the issues flowing from the power failure and assures customers that additional operating procedures are being put in place to prevent a recurrence.