Scrabulous downed by technical glitch

Players of the online word game Scrabulous face a frustrating wait to finish their games as technical problems have forced it off the web.

A message on the Facebook website, where Scrabulous has become an increasingly popular pastime, intimates that an upgrade made to the service yesterday has not worked as well as planned.

"What we did last night did not work, we need another day to get this running. There's no point in letting everyone try to play and face errors, so we're closing it for some more time. Please check back tomorrow," the message reads.

Some 283,734 people have downloaded the Scrabulous application so far. The game's developers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla told Web User that the popularity of Scrabulous had taken them by surprise.

"We never expected it to take off so well. In fact, for the first week or so, there were not even a thousand users. We had installed this on a single server and have now had to add on four web servers to ensure smooth game play. However, even now we feel the need to upgrade the services on a constant basis," said Rajat Agarwalla.

Scrabulous is a game for two or more players, with each player taking turns to use randomly allocated letters to make a word on a grid. The Scrabulous website was launched in July 2006 and made its debut on the Facebook site in June 2007.

www.scrabulous.com

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