As I reported last week, the Canadian province of British Columbia became the first jurisdiction in North America to legalize and regulate online gambling when they launched a casino on Thursday. British Columbia’s Lottery Corporation launched an online casino on their PlayNow.com website.

Now I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the new online casino has been wildly popular. The bad news is that the website is currently down. That means that online gamblers who want to play now, can’t do it at PlayNow.com.

Within a couple hours of launching the new government-run online casino, the server crashed due to being overloaded by visitors. The Lottery Corporation didn’t have an infrastructure that could handle the massive increase in traffic volume at the site. Due to that, the website is currently down and Canadian citizens eager to play their favorite online casino games can no longer do so, unless they go back to the foreign operators.

While it’s bad news that the website is down and the Lottery Corp. couldn’t handle the traffic, it’s good news that the site was so popular. Online gambling is often seen as a small issue, and in the grand scheme of things maybe it is. However, the crashing of the B.C. server shows just how popular that activity is, which is a good reason to push for further legalization throughout the rest of North America.

There is no timetable yet for a re-launch of the website. Whenever it does get back up and running, though, the Lottery Corporation can expect a large number of deposits and wagers from British Columbia residents.

Tags: British Columbia Lottery Corporation, British Columbia online gambling, Canada online casino, Canada online gambling, Canadian online casino, gambling regulation, online casino, online gambling, PlayNow.com

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 7:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.