Full Tilt Poker Site Crashes

December 31 - As thousands of dedicated online poker players flocked to Full Tilt Poker for the traditional Sunday tournaments, the site management's biggest nightmare came true when  the server crashed.

Full Tilt Poker immediately put up an error message that read: "Unscheduled Maintenance in Progress: We recently experienced a network outage. We expect to be operational shortly."

However, two hours hours later, Full Tilt technicians were still struggling with the problem and management was forced to admit that tournament play had been permanently disrupted for the day.

As such, thousands of potential tournament players could not access the site from around 8 pm on Sunday evening - an hour that is seen as particularly busy during the week.

Just before midnight on Sunday night, Full Tilt customer support contacted all players and said if the tournament had been cancelled before the money stage, tournament rules governing Full Tilt poker would be followed to the tee.

This meant that all players at the time of the site's crash who were in a tournament would have their buy in and tournament fees returned to them.

In addition, the site would divide and distribute the remaining prize pool to players according to their chip count.

Full Tilt technicians managed to solve the problem and the second largest poker room in the industry was up and running by Monday morning.