Grace Media Casinos Offline For Nearly A Week

On Tuesday 10th June, the Grace Media network of online casinos and bingo sites went offline “for a few hours” so that an lobby upgrade could be done.  At many of these sites, players were notified about this a couple of weeks in advance and promised that:

“Not only will our new lobby be quicker to load, but it’s also designed to be more user-friendly on mobile devices. We have revamped the overall look and feel to enhance your gaming experience”.

Giving players plenty of notice and doing the migration on a weekday morning when fewer people are likely to be playing seems like a great plan.  But alas, many plans don’t survive contact with reality and this turned out to be one of them.

Hours became days and still the sites were displaying “down for maintenance” messages like these:

Surely they would be back up for peak time, the weekend?  But no, apparently the issues weren’t easy to fix. Players at BOGOF Bingo were sent an email at 5pm on Friday, apologising profusely for the delay but – very disappointingly – giving no indication of when they might be back up.

“We would like to extend our sincere apologies for the ongoing downtime…. We have been experiencing technical issues with our new platform, causing the maintenance to take much longer than anticipated. Please rest assured that our team is working tirelessly to address these issues and get BOGOF Bingo back up and running as soon as possible”.

Now it’s 16th June, and nearly a week after the issue started, many Grace Media brands are still offline.   Others are back up – but only sort of.

When I tried registering at one, I couldn’t see a welcome offer to claim, was unable to deposit and received four welcome emails from them, all sent at exactly the same time. One of the emails said my registration was complete, two of them said my account had been verified, and the other one said verification had failed and I needed to upload documents.

Returning players are prompted to reset their password.  No promotions are available and while games appear in the lobby, there doesn’t seem to be any search facility to help you find the games you want to play.

All of this is confusing and off-putting for players so you might want to delay signing up or playing at any Grace Media sites until the lobby upgrade is fully completed, whenever that turns out to be.  Let’s hope it doesn’t take another week!

UPDATE (26th July): While most of these sites are now back online (after more than 2 weeks of downtime) the lobby upgrade is clearly not fully complete.  Only Pragmatic Play games are available, there’s no search box and many sites still don’t have a welcome offer. Important pages such as the FAQ and the Terms & Conditions are not functioning correctly; the FAQ is a broken link and the subsections of the Terms & Conditions don’t open so can’t be read.

The Grace Media sites listed below have working welcome offers if you want to go ahead and give the new lobby a try regardless.