Scrabulous Shutdown Spells Server Crash for Hasbro

On Tuesday, Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada awoke to horror - the shutdown of the extremely popular Scrabulous game, in the wake of a lawsuit filed by Hasbro, the parent company of the official Scrabble game. There shouldn't have been much withdrawal pain, though, since after all, Electronic Arts (EA, which handles the digital rights to Scrabble for Hasbro) had already created a beta version of the official game, right?

Except for the fact that the servers couldn't handle the increased load from all the Scrabulous refugees, and crashed.

They're still down as of this writing. Going to the game page and clicking "Go to Application" nets you the following message:

We're working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!

We appreciate all the great feedback we've received over the past week and as a result we're making changes to Scrabble for its official launch in mid-August, including a streamlined app with the option to turn-off animations for faster gameplay and full keyboard functionality for those who prefer this way to play.

Please continue to let us know how we can make Scrabble - the best word game on Facebook - even better!

- The Scrabble Team

The application wasn't doing too well review-wise anyway. It's currently rated 1.2 out of 5.

A few wall posts on the game page:

Hey, how about adding "Why did we take down 'Scrabulous'?" to your FAQs? I'm sure all of us would like to know why Hasbro didn't just partner up with the successful and PLAYABLE application. Address the issue. Don't ignore the elephant in the room.

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You guys really suck. Like it would have been SO much trouble to make sure we could actually USE your product before taking down Scrabulous. You suck suck suck and lot of other 4 letter words.

As far as licensing the Scrabulous game, it's rumored Hasbro tried, but the offer was rejected as insufficient.

BTW, if you still really want to play Scrabulous, there's still the original website, which existed before the Facebook app.