Play-Cricket Weekend Performance : 18th & 19th April 2026 Follow
We want to be fully transparent with the Play Cricket network about what happened across the weekend of 18–19 April, the impact it had on clubs, scorers, and followers, and the steps we've taken to address it. This statement sets out a factual account of both incidents: what went wrong, at what scale, how it was detected, and what we're doing about it both immediately and longer term.
We know that Play-Cricket is absolutely critical for thousands of clubs across the country, and we take that responsibility seriously. We're sorry for the disruption this caused, and we're committed to making sure the actions we've taken now and in the coming weeks meaningfully reduce the risk of anything similar happening again. Our teams will all be online around the world throughout the coming weekends to ensure that things are running as smoothly as they can.
We know that Play-Cricket is absolutely critical for thousands of clubs across the country, and we take that responsibility seriously. We're sorry for the disruption this caused, and we're committed to making sure the actions we've taken now and in the coming weeks meaningfully reduce the risk of anything similar happening again. Our teams will all be online around the world throughout the coming weekends to ensure that things are running as smoothly as they can.
Saturday: 09:00 - 19:00
Severe disruption to scorecards flowing from PCS to P-C.com
No loss of ability to score. No issues with PCS Pro.
Minor issues with Play-Cricket Live on some older devices.
Impact:
Note: No scorecards are believed to have been lost during the incident — all messages were saved and backed up to mitigate against exactly this kind of situation.
At the beginning of the day, scorers and followers of matches would have seen no issues, however scorers were not being informed if their scorecard updates were being rejected by the server due to mistakes. As the number of validation messages grew, queues backed up and scorecard updates started getting jumbled, leading to confusing scorecards and incomplete match summaries.
Scale:
1,217 matches (55% of those scored on PCs) had at least one failed scorecard validation, with 1,075 of those affected by the bug. 215 scorecards were still incomplete as of yesterday, and 83 will require the scorer to resync the match from their local copy. We are working to notify affected scorers directly, once league deadlines have closed (so that we don't undo changes from club and league administrators).
Cause:
A process added in the off-season to mitigate against slow procesing seen last season functioned as designed queuing messages up rather than causing the application slow down, however it failed to account for scorecards submitted from the app failing validation when sent to Play-Cricket. Scorers weren't being notified that their upload had failed due to an invalid scorecard, and the queue backed up, causing a number of knock-on effects and leading to some messages being dropped, or arriving in the wrong order.
Detected:
The issue was not visible in ECB's automated monitoring. It came to our attention via feedback on Monday morning, at which point investigation began immediately.
Actions taken ✅
- Play-Cricket Live app released to app stores 10:09 Monday fixing known bugs
- Queueing mechanism which caused the issue removed from service at 09:45 Monday
- Detailed reports produced and analysed to identify all affected matches
- Additional automated alerting and detection processes implemented ahead of future weekends
In progress ⌛️
- Direct notification and resolution for the 293 matches still requiring assistance - scorers who need to take action will be contacted individually
- Human-eyes monitoring of scorecards instated for coming weekends to improve detection
Sunday: 22:30 - 23:05
35 minute disruption to service affecting display of scorecards and the Play-Cricket API.
No disruption to main website, admin areas or scoring.
Impact:
Slowdown to service when viewing scorecard pages, or when querying the Play-Cricket API. Previous mitigations mean that scorecards run on a separate set of servers to the rest of the site, so that if scorecards present an issue, the main functionality of the product is protected.
Scale:
1-5% of page loads on match centre pages were very slow, and users of the Play-Cricket API will have seen slow responses; the rest of the site was unaffected. Median page load times held steady throughout the incident, showing that only a minority of users were impacted. At the 95th percentile, load times increased by around 50%, and the worst-affected users were seeing page load times measured in minutes rather than seconds. The application recovered fully within 5 minutes after action was taken.
Cause:
Two clubs were found to be making an extremely high number of requests to the API, seemingly due to innocent mistakes in their websites' code. The full season's fixture and result list was requested approximately 40,000 times in a 30 minute window by these clubs alone, causing the application database to saturate, and normal requests from the website were stuck waiting for these long running API requests to complete.
Detected:
By automatic monitoring, within 5 minutes of the incident starting.
Actions taken ✅
- API access suspended for the clubs generating the high request volume; service returned to normal within 5 minutes of action being taken
- Additional servers added to the cluster to help the application recover faster
- Additional monitoring added to API methods this week
In progress 🔄
- Rate limits for the API being implemented to protect the vast majority of consumers from extreme edge cases where traffic exceeds reasonable bounds
- API management strategy reprioritised as a strategic focus for this year, with plans in motion to overhaul the API and how we operate it.
Moving Forward:
We are absolutely committed to making Play-Cricket the most stable and reliable platform for the game. All of our team and that of our suppliers around the world will continue to work tirelessly to support and optimise the platform for this season, and for those to come.
We have set ourselves a target of no perceptible downtime on the platform this season, and while the mitigations we have in place did succeed in avoiding a situation where scoring was unavailable, we recognise that this incident will have significantly knocked your faith in our ability to deliver a stable platform for you this year. Weekends with incidents have been on a steady downward trend over the past few years, but we will not be happy until that that number is zero.
We will be online and working on matchdays through the season to ensure that incidents like this do not recur, and that any issues are able to be detected and acted on in real-time, before they cause major problems for clubs and players.
Additionally, we will be sharing a further article in the coming weeks setting out all the work that has been done to address what we learned last season, and informing you of what to expect from Play-Cricket in 2026.
Thank you again for your love and passion for our brilliant game.
Best wishes,
The Play-Cricket Team at the ECB.