By Adam Ulick | August 5, 2008

Full Tilt Poker shut down for scheduled maintenance this morning, and the poker forums are already swarming with posts from disgruntled players who have no access to their favorite site.

The down time was scheduled to last between 3AM PST to 8AM PST, which was meant to cause minimal disruption to players in the Eastern and Central US while depriving European players of their poker fix until the afternoon. By 5am posts started appearing on forums such as 2+2 and pocket Fives, with messages along these lines: “just woke up, full tilt down???”

We tested Full Tilt, and the connection page shows a deck of cards fanning back and forth while the software attempts to connect, followed soon by the message “Sorry, unable to connect to server.”

Some membersof the poker community have taken this break with humor, while others seem antsy. These are some forum posts from the past hour:

“Sitting here watching the 2 decks fan out and back is great entertainment imo“

“who ever is the first 2 get it working please post that they did so. cause i'm sick of trying i finally get some time to play poker and FTP is down. just f'n great…..”

“I think it's just one deck.But yeah, i really dig watching it too.:) “

The Full Tilt website has a very visible announcement for its scheduled update, with the following message:

At Full Tilt Poker we strive to maintain a stable system, but sometimes downtime is unavoidable for routine maintenance or updates, and occasional unplanned outages.
If you're having trouble connecting to the Full Tilt Poker Client, check this area for updates on server status.
The system is currently down for maintenance. Please check back soon!

Update: about an hour ago a Full Tilt member of staff posted this on a poker forum:

Hey everyone,
Quick update - It looks like we're going to be down longer than anticipated. We'll hopefully be back up within the next two hours. Sorry about that. You can stop watching the cards fan back and forth for a little while, though!

Full Tilt should be back up and running within an hour.

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