Casino and Hotel Back Online by 2:15 AM, With No Contract in Place
A regional gaming operator went completely offline with an unresponsive MSP. Three engineers including the CTO mobilised within 15 minutes and restored the network overnight.
Client: a regional gaming and hospitality operator
The challenge
A complete network outage took the casino and hotel fully offline at once. Gaming operations, hotel systems and customer services all stopped, and every hour of that is direct, unrecoverable revenue.
The incumbent managed service provider was unresponsive — no escalation path, no support, no remediation underway. The environment spanned several manufacturer platforms, so restoring it needed breadth across vendors rather than depth in one.
BlackHawk Data held no contract and no support agreement with the operator at the time.
What we did
Three engineers, including the CTO, were mobilised within 15 minutes and went on site — with no contract and no guarantee of being paid for it.
Full network operations were restored by 2:15 AM, bringing casino and hotel systems back and re-establishing business continuity overnight.
The operator subsequently moved its technology strategy and purchasing to BlackHawk Data, which went on to architect and implement the full network redesign for the casino expansion, working alongside third-party architects across networking, wireless, datacenter and physical design.
Outcomes
- 15 minutes — from call to senior engineering leadership mobilised
- 2:15 AM — full casino and hotel network operations restored
- 4 — vendor environments unified in the modernization that followed
- Crisis → partner — an emergency response became the long-term modernization relationship