Polymarket hit by World Cup opening day outages, with Friday spike
Polymarket users experienced intermittent outages on Thursday, June 11, 2026, coinciding with the opening day of the World Cup, with additional reports of access issues spiking again on Friday, June 13, amid high-stakes tournament trading activity. The disruptions affected the platform's decentralized infrastructure, though sources provided no details on cause, duration, or number of users impacted. Reports of the outages surfaced Saturday, June 13, per App.com coverage. The timing tied Polymarket's technical difficulties directly to one of its highest-volume trading periods of the year, as the platform had recently become an exclusive US prediction market partner for the World Cup broadcast cycle.
For a platform betting its growth on capturing tournament-related retail flow from soccer fans, going down when the World Cup kicks off risks pushing those users to Kalshi or FanDuel Predicts before brand loyalty sets in. Polymarket's infrastructure is now a live liability in a traffic war where seconds of downtime convert to permanent churn.