Venmo went down after the Super Bowl, and some people think they know why

Venmi087
Venmi087

UPDATE, Feb. 8, 2016, 1:54 p.m. EST: A Venmo spokesperson responded to Mashable’s request for additional information regarding the service outage on Sunday following the Super Bowl:


So you thought the dabbing quarterback with the million-dollar smile, Cam Newton, was going to win, huh? Well now, if you put your money where your mouth was — that is, you made a bet on the game with your friends — it may be time to pay up. 

But if you decided to do that via the payment app Venmo, you were, at least temporarily, flat out of luck.

Just minutes after Super Bowl 50 ended, the mobile payments service went down, or at least lagged, for many users. At least some users reported that their payments did not go through.

A number of them then switched over to Twitter to voice their complaints — and their conspiracy theories.

SEE ALSO: You can now make in-app purchases with Venmo

What theories? Well, some people (who have offered no proof whatsoever) think the down time has to do with bets being paid off now that the favorites to win the Super Bowl, the Carolina Panthers, have lost. That would presumably result in a ton of payment activity from all the people who were so confident about a Panthers win. 

Of course, Venmo didn't attribute the issue to any betting activity, nor did the company offer any explanation for the service interruption.

But that didn't stop Venmo users on Twitter from speculating about the timing.

We may never know what was behind the app's problems so soon after the Super Bowl. But if people were indeed using it to pay off bets, this wasn't a great advertisement for the service. (Or maybe it was.)

Venmo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.