Two of online poker’s biggest tournament series picked an awkward weekend to start wobbling. PokerStars and CoinPoker both suffered intermittent crashes over the weekend, according to Pokerfuse, just as WCOOP reached its Main Event Sunday and CoinPoker’s Global Online Poker Championship entered its closing stretch.
The timing is what turns a technical hiccup into a proper poker story. PokerStars launched three No-Limit Hold’em WCOOP Main Events on Sunday, September 27, with $5.75 million guaranteed between them, while CoinPoker is reaching the end of a GOPC festival that had already paid close to $60 million before its final week.
PokerStars Glitches Arrive on WCOOP Main Event Sunday
Pokerfuse reported on September 28 that PokerStars and CoinPoker had both suffered intermittent crashes during the weekend. At the time of writing, there has been no public confirmation from either operator of a common cause, and there is no evidence that the issues were connected.
For PokerStars, Sunday was about as inconvenient a day as possible for instability. The WCOOP 2026 schedule put all three NLHE Main Events on September 27, including the $10,300 World Championship with a $2.5 million guarantee.
The $109 Main Event carried a $1.25 million guarantee and the $1,050 version guaranteed $2 million. Those tournaments sit at the centre of a 25th-anniversary WCOOP containing 350 tournaments across 121 numbered events, so even intermittent client problems are particularly noticeable when thousands of players have built their Sunday around the series.
PokerStars still has a substantial Monday schedule ahead. Three PLO Main Events begin on September 28 with another $750,000 guaranteed between them, while the $25,000 Super High Roller and several Main Event second-chance tournaments are also scheduled for later in the day.
CoinPoker Also Reported to Have Crashed
CoinPoker was the other operator named in the Pokerfuse report. Its timing is similarly uncomfortable because the first Global Online Poker Championship is reaching the end of a 37-day run that has become one of the largest online poker series of 2026.
Poker Type reported last week that CoinPoker’s GOPC had already cleared its $50 million guarantee, with close to $60 million paid and more than 42,000 unique players participating. The series was due to run through September 28.
This is not CoinPoker’s first technical interruption during the festival. The operator experienced widespread connection problems on the GOPC’s opening day in August, when affected tournaments were paused and subsequently restarted in batches. That earlier incident should not automatically be assumed to have the same cause as this weekend’s reported crashes.
No Evidence Yet of a Security Problem
The important distinction for players is between a client or server outage and a security breach. As of Monday morning, the available reporting establishes intermittent crashes, but does not establish that player accounts, balances or personal information were compromised.
There has also been no verified explanation showing that PokerStars and CoinPoker were hit by the same technical problem. Two poker clients struggling over the same busy weekend may be related, or it may simply be an unfortunate coincidence. Until the operators provide technical detail, anything stronger would be speculation.
PokerStars has history here. Its 2022 WCOOP Main Event weekend was disrupted by a DDoS attack that forced tournaments to be cancelled and later rescheduled. That incident makes any WCOOP outage immediately familiar to long-time players, but there is currently no basis for claiming the 2026 problems were another DDoS attack.
A Bad Weekend for Online Poker to Go Offline
The broader issue is reliability when tournament traffic peaks. Online series sell players on fixed schedules, huge guarantees and the idea that one Sunday can be worth planning weeks around. A recreational player who satellites into a Main Event, or a professional who has arranged an entire session around it, has little interest in the difference between a brief crash and a prolonged outage while their tables disappear.
That pressure is magnified this September because several major series overlap. PokerStars is in the final days of WCOOP, CoinPoker is closing the GOPC and GGPoker’s WSOP Online series is also reaching its conclusion. Poker Type has followed the WCOOP title race throughout the month, including Benny Glaser’s record-breaking run, which has since stretched even further.
For now, the sensible conclusion is narrow: both PokerStars and CoinPoker were reported to have suffered intermittent crashes during one of the busiest online poker weekends of the year. What caused those problems, how many players were affected and whether any compensation will be required are the questions worth watching next.
