An explosion at a Gibraltarpower station on Sunday (pictured, image courtesy Telegraph) put a damper the Easter festivities of many people in the territory, as electricity to the area was knocked out for several hours. The blast’s effects were not just felt locally, though, as the lack of power started a ripple effect, blacking out telecommunications services used by online gambling operators that have set up shop on the peninsula.

The incident began at around 1:00pm local time when a generator caught fire at the Waterport Power Station because of a mechanical failure. The generator then exploded, starting a larger fire that created huge clouds of smoke that could be seen for miles. As a result, power was cut to most residents of Gibraltar. Fortunately, nobody was hurt.

Among those affected were several online gambling firms, including William Hill, PartyPoker, Betfred, and Ladbrokes, all of which have offices in the vicinity. William Hill’s office is located next to the power station; about 50 employees were evacuated. The company’s services were down for two-and-a-half hours, aggravating customers who wanted to place bets.

“It is just one of those freak events nobody could have predicted,” William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe told AFP.com. “There will be those who will claim they would have backed a winner, but there will be others who have been saved from backing a loser.”

Betfrednotified customers of the outage at 1:42pm local time via Twitter, suggesting that players visit TotePool.com, a Betfred-related sports betting site based in the UK and unaffected by the explosion. Though power had been restored to many locations within a few hours and to virtually everybody by 9:30pm, Betfred did not have all of its functionality restored by 7:45am the next day, though the mobile site was up and running.

PartyPokerwas also slow to get back online. Its Gibraltar offices located only about half-a-kilometer from the power station, PartyPoker took upwards of 13 hours to get back up and running. In the meantime, it had to cancel many tournaments on the biggest day of the week, including the Sunday $200,000 Guaranteed, which you may have noticed was absent from our weekly Tournament Review.

Looking at PartyPoker’s traffic figures on PokerScout, it appears that the extended outage really did a number on the site. In the four days leading up to Sunday, PokerScout showed peak cash game traffic in about the 3,400 to 3,700-player range. On Sunday, the day of the fire, that peak plunged to 1,763 and only rose by another 100 the next day. By comparison, PartyPoker’s cash game traffic reached 3,525 players the previous Sunday.

The iPoker Network, home to Ladbrokes, William Hill, and BetFred, among others, also took a hit, but because many sites that were not affected buffered the network, things were not nearly as bad as they could have been. iPoker’s peak traffic reached 2,711 cash game players on Sunday, falling from a range of about 3,000 to 3,500 during the previous four days. A week earlier, peak traffic was 2,947 cash game players.

When the various poker sites initially went down, players took to the internet forums, predictably in a panic. Comments such as “Is this the end?” and “Finally had it with iPoker, uninstalling every client” were not abnormal.

Once the reason for the downtime was publicized, many players understood, even if they were a bit frustrated. In the couple of days since the incident, it does not appear that anyone has had any problems with lost funds or any other issues of note.

Want the latest poker headlines and interviews? Follow PocketFives on Twitterand Like PocketFives on Facebook. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed.