[UPDATE: @VegasRex reporting people at Monte Carlo are not able to cash out at slot machines. That goes beyond how Absher described the impact. He says he just lost the dollar he put in. But he was able to cash out OK at Aria. See VegasRex's pic of the "call attendant" readout at a slot machine at Monte Carlo.]
Poor MGM Mirage. They just don't get a break, not even on Christmas.
Today, an electrical outage at the main IT center for the company -- it's at an "undisclosed location," according to MGM Mirage spokesman Gordon Absher -- has led to widespread problems "at multiple properties." "The power outage knocked some systems offline. The generators kicked in and the systems are reloading and rebooting. It's a minor inconvenience for us at the operations level."
Absher said he's not sure what caused the outage, when it happened, which other resorts were affected or precisely what the impact has been. His understanding is that players are unable to cash out at kiosks and have to go to cages to do so. He said he's unlikely to be able to provide a fuller explanation until tomorrow.
I asked Absher if people sitting at the slots would have noticed anything had occurred until they went to the cash-out kiosks. He didn't know.
A source at Bellagio told me he was informed there was a car crash that precipitated the outage. Visitor Michael Howie, who Tweets at @mchl87, wrote at about 12:45 p.m. PT: "The slot ticketing system is down for Aria and Bellagio, maybe all MGM properties?" He followed that shortly thereafter with: "That means every slot play is a hand pay (slow and annoying) or if you do get a ticket out, you have to go to cashier."
In addition, blogger VegasRex Tweeted around the same time: "@Doh! The Aria Poker Room List Screen http://post.ly/GCRy." This was his image:
Absher didn't know if Aria's poker-screen problem was related.
I asked VegasRex via DM on Twitter to let me know what he's seeing at Aria. He wrote back just now that the slots are working fine and he's going to check on the cashing-out process.
MGM Mirage seems to be particularly prone to these sorts of snafus. On Easter Sunday 2004, Bellagio suffered a massive blackout that lasted for four days. In October 2007, a problem with the Opera reservation system caused such huge problems for the internal room-booking system for five days that guests were being given keys to occupied or unclean rooms. And just this past January, another computer problem brought down the online reservations systems for all of their resorts for hours.
It's kind of amazing, really, that such a huge, sophisticated corporation would be so vulnerable. I don't recall ever hearing of such problems at any Harrah's resorts, for instance. It might be worth a closer look.
