Leeds expertise helps Sky Betting & Gaming shoulder the digital load

“November brings not only ‘Black Friday’ but ‘Cyber Monday’.

“Depending on who you speak to these are either two marketing inspired events designed to sell more goods or momentous moments in the calendar for digital retailers.

“Either way they are ‘peak operation’ days when online activity hits a high, placing fluctuating loads on infrastructure that tests platforms to the limit.

“Coping with these kinds of loads are significant measures of the capacity and capability of a tech business and involve around the clock work to deliver a seamless customer experience.

“And as impressive as some of Amazon’s Black Friday statistics sound, they don’t stack up to the loads we deal with on a weekly basis.

“Pretty much any major sporting event brings a new ‘Black Friday’ or ‘Cyber Monday’ for our engineers based here in Leeds.

“Last year, Amazon’s busiest ever day in the UK saw them sell 64 items a second.

“At 1430 last Saturday, on a fairly standard weekend of Premier League football, we were processing 110 bets per second.

“Our current peak bets per second hit 198 on our busiest day.

“After most matches had finished we then facilitated an enormous 10,000 logins per minute as people went to check the status of their bets.

“All of this activity was managed and served from our HQ at Wellington Place.

“Ours is just one example of the digital loads being handled in Leeds on a daily basis.

“Making sure the rest of the country and indeed the rest of the world knows about this expertise is something we can all work together on doing.”

The Yorkshire Evening Post recently launched its Digital City platform in partnership with Sky Betting & Gaming.

The platform is designed to highlight the giant strides being made by a sector that boasts around 3,000 organisations in Leeds.