It was retro-Saturday last weekend in the Northeastern United States, as New York City, Philadelphia, and other areas stretching from New Jersey up to Maine had no internet service for almost 24 hours. As frustrating as it was for millions of people, the outage provided the online poker cash game monitoring site PokerScout the opportunity to see if the area of the United States has a major impact on internet poker statistics. This was the subject of a recent PokerScout Scouting Report.

PokerScout established a baseline number of sorts by comparing last Thursday and Friday’s cash game traffic to traffic from the same days the week before. By doing this, the site could have a picture of what the traffic trend looked like when the “series of tubes” were working properly. PokerScout did the same comparison for Saturday and calculated the difference between the two numbers.

The U.S.-facing sites and networks appeared to be negatively affected by the internet outage, as one might expect. One showed a 15% increase in traffic from the previous Thursday/Friday to last Thursday/Friday, but just a 6% increase from Saturday to Saturday. Similarly, another network went from no change to an 8% drop. One other did better, seeing a drop of just 3%.

On the flip side, one would likely expect non-U.S.-facing sites to be unscathed, as an internet outage in the U.S. has nothing to do with their customer bases. PokerStarsand Full Tilt Pokerstayed true to this expectation, seeing little difference in their weekday-to-weekend traffic changes (down 2% and up 1%, respectively). Other non-U.S. sites and networks, though, experienced more significant traffic differences. The difference in 888‘s traffic change from Thursday/Friday to Saturday was negative 4%, iPoker’s traffic change was down 5%, and PartyPoker‘s fell 6%.

While those numbers look a bit interesting, there is no reason to think the U.S. internet problem was the cause. One’s initial thought might be that devoted poker players in the U.S. have worked around signup restrictions and been playing on non-U.S.-facing sites, but PokerScout says there could be a number of explanations. For example, weather could have played a factor, some Canadians could have been affected, or this all could be just random noise.

In addition, PokerScout reports that Full Tilt normally does better than PartyPoker during North American primetime anyway, a fact that could discount the notion of “illicit” gaming by Americans.

The outage, which began around 8:00am ET, reportedly was the fault of a broken fiber-optic switch at a New York-area network hub operated by Level 3 Communications. Level 3 provides the backbone for internet traffic for major internet service providers and large businesses.

Customers of Time Warner and Cablevisionsaw their internet connectivity disappear on Saturday. Time Warner’s customers were particularly vocal, taking to Twitter to complain. It did not help matters that Time Warner was slow to reroute internet traffic, resulting in an outage of almost 24 hours.

Cablevision got on top of things much faster, rerouting traffic in about an hour. A Cablevision spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that “overall internet access was not affected,” only access to some individual websites.

A similar outage would have a much bigger impact on the online poker industry in about a month, when New Jersey’s intrastate internet gambling industry is slated to go live. See what the buzz is all about in PocketFives’ New Jersey poker community.

PokerScout’s Scouting Report is a daily newsletter for the online poker industry, with in-depth data and analysis of the market. More information can be found by clicking here or contacting support@pokerscout.com.

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