Kalshi’s payment infrastructure became a significant point of failure tonight under what can only be an obscene amount of traffic. Kalshi spent months running a very aggressive acquisition campaign and onboarded PayPal and Venmo last week to prepare for the demand. Whatever preparations were made were clearly not enough and the system buckled.
The complaints began to surface shortly after 5 PM via Discord and X and lasted right through the game. Some users reported that their payments eventually landed, but others were still waiting by the fourth quarter.
Man, @Kalshi deposits going down during the Super Bowl is incredibly embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/eYkd5uGfuY
— Howard Myones (@HowardMyones) February 8, 2026
A massive bottleneck that lasted the entire game
Complaints surfaced almost immediately when users attempted to fund their accounts, but the corresponding balance never appeared. Some reports indicated the app displayed the deposit as failed — even though the bank had already released the funds.
Co-founder Luana Lopes Lara addressed the situation on X:
Some deposits are delayed because of the amount of traffic and deposits we’re getting. Your money is safe and on the way, it will just take longer to land.
— Luana Lopes Lara (@luanalopeslara) February 9, 2026
The story is the same nearly everywhere.
One user wrote that they had deposited $1,100 and were still waiting — asking how the platform could deduct money from a bank account without crediting it. Another said they had been waiting over an hour for a transfer and that the money was gone from their bank, adding that it was now too late to place the trades they had wanted and asking whether Kalshi would reimburse them.
A third user asked the Kalshi Ops team for a “rough estimate” of what “shortly” meant, noting the Super Bowl was already half over. A member of Kalshi’s operations team acknowledged the reports in the channel and said the company was “all-hands-on-deck.”
If anyone at Kalshi reads this, your Ops team needs a raise after tonight.
A recurring problem at peak traffic
Sunday’s breakdown marks the third time in five months that Kalshi’s consumer-facing platform has degraded during a high-volume event. In October 2025, roughly half of Kalshi’s users were unable to access the app or website during Saturday college football games, according to InGame. The exchange’s API continued to function during that incident, meaning institutional traders and automated market makers could still operate while retail users were locked out. Kalshi later refunded users whose resting orders were filled by API traders during the downtime. A separate outage in August 2025 affected the full platform, including the exchange itself.
Hopefully this sorted in time for the World Cup, which is expected to be bigger than the Super Bowl.
We’ve reached out to Kalshi for comment on the scope of the deposit delays, estimated resolution timeline, and whether affected users will receive compensation. We’ll update this article with any response.
Sources: Kalshi Discord support channel, X posts from Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara and @HowardMyones, Kalshi on-site warning, InGame reporting on October 2025 outage.
Cheryle Shepstone
Cheryle is Director of Content and Strategy at DeFi Rate. She oversees the prediction market research, platform reviews, and editorial methodology behind every guide—from primary source verification through final fact-check. Before DeFi Rate, she led content and growth strategy at Catena Media, where she helped shape content and revenue strategy for regulated and financial markets. She has 20 years of experience in research and marketing strategy
