Yesterday afternoon (GMT) reports started appearing on Twitter that a large number of slot machines at a number of MGM International-owned casinos in Las Vegas and other locations across the US had suddenly gone offline.
MGM International own and operate some of the worlds most famous hotels and casinos, such as the Bellagio, the MGM Grand, The Luxor, and the Mandalay Bay – all of which are on the Las Vegas strip.
Further afield, MGM own sites in Ohio, New York, Maryand, California, Darwin (Australia), and some places in China.
Soon after the first posts about gambling machines, came a number of other messages reporting people having issues accessing hotel rooms – their digital keys not working, then others appeared saying that people couldn’t access their MyMGM accounts
MGM Statement
Shortly after the flurry of activity on social media, MGM released their own statements about the issue – initially the statement read that the MGM Rewards application was undergoing maintenance and customers were advised to speak with hotel staff if they had questions or issues.
Soon after that, the MGM website was changed to display a solitary page informing people that the website was unavailable with a list of direct-dial numbers for people to call if they had issues with bookings, etc.
Approximately 2 hours after the initial statements about systems being offline due to maintenance, another official message was posted stating that the organisation had in fact been the victim of a cyber attack.
The post mentions that the company had taken action to protect systems and data, including shutting down some systems – this could be the reason for the slot machines being offline. Modern slots are no longer stand-alone systems but rather dedicated computer systems linked over a network to back-end servers which monitor each and every play and how much money they take and pay out.
Could this be the making of the next Oceans 11 film? I’m sure a director somewhere is thinking about it.
