The Outage That Prompted This Guide

In early September 2026, DUPR experienced a security incident and notified users by email. DUPR’s email stated that it does not store financial, payment, or password data on its systems. The app and website were down for roughly two to three days and were restored around September 8, 2026. DUPR has not posted about the incident on its own blog or site — the only disclosure so far has been that email. For the full, continuously updated timeline, see our DUPR outage explainer.

Some players on r/Pickleball have also reported login and MFA problems after the restore — six-digit code emails not arriving, or no field to enter one — and a few say matches they entered shortly before the outage never got rating-calculated and now appear missing, even though their existing ratings look intact. None of that is confirmed by DUPR directly, but it’s exactly the kind of disruption that lands on an organizer’s desk in the middle of a season, not DUPR’s.

This isn’t really a DUPR-specific problem. Any rating provider, app, or third-party service your league depends on can go down for a day, a weekend, or longer. The organizers who handle it well are the ones who never let their season depend entirely on one outside service staying up. Here’s how to run that way.

1. Keep Playing

Nothing about a rating provider being down should stop matches from happening. Ratings are a scoring input, not a prerequisite for play. If your season is mid-schedule, run it as planned — courts, matchups, and match times don’t depend on whether a third-party rating app is reachable. If a player wants an extra game on an off week, point them to open games and pickup sessions near them rather than waiting on a rating app.

2. Record Every Score Yourself, Immediately

Don’t let a rating app be the only place a score lives. Whatever system you use for scheduling and standings, capture the final score there the moment a match ends — not "we’ll enter it into the rating app later." If your primary record of a match is a screenshot inside someone else’s app, an outage (or the login/MFA issues some DUPR users are reporting) can leave you with no usable record at all.

Practically, this means:

  • Use a league management system that stores match results and scores independently of any rating provider.
  • Have one designated player per match responsible for submitting the score to your system, the same day.
  • Treat the rating provider as a downstream consumer of your data, not the source of it.

3. Keep Standings Running on Your Own System

Standings are just math over recorded scores — wins, losses, point differential, tiebreakers. None of that requires a rating provider to be online. If your standings live in the same place as your rating data and that place is down, your whole season stalls. If standings are computed from scores you already control, an outage anywhere else is a non-event for your players.

This is exactly where VolleyForge’s league tools and tournament tools are built to help: scheduling, score submission, and live standings run on VolleyForge’s own system, so a rating provider having a bad week doesn’t touch your season’s results. To be clear, VolleyForge isn’t a DUPR replacement or a rating authority — it’s a league and tournament operations platform, and today its own skill ratings are self-entered by players rather than an independent algorithmic rating — see our DUPR rating guide and explainer on how pickleball ratings actually workfor how that compares. What it does give you is a season that keeps running — schedule, scores, and standings — independent of any outside rating service’s uptime.

4. Communicate With Players Early and Plainly

Players notice when a rating app they use is down, and they’ll wonder what it means for the season. Send a short update as soon as you’re aware of an outage:

  • Confirm that matches and standings are unaffected and the season continues as scheduled.
  • Say plainly what you don’t know yet — don’t guess at what caused an outage or speculate about what data may or may not have been affected.
  • Give players a way to report problems (like being unable to log in to a rating app) so you know who’s affected without assuming it's everyone.
  • Follow up once the provider is back, including anything you had to reconcile.

A brief, honest update beats silence. Players forgive an outage; they don’t forgive finding out from someone else’s Reddit thread that their organizer knew and said nothing.

5. Protect Match History Going Forward

Whatever the cause, a real lesson from this month is that match history stored only inside a third-party app can be at risk during an incident. Some players are reporting matches entered right before DUPR’s outage never made it into rating calculations. Whether or not that turns out to be permanent, it’s a reason to keep your own copy of history that doesn’t depend on any single provider staying up. If any of your players are dealing with this directly — locked out, or worried a match vanished — point them to our player-side guide to DUPR login issues and protecting match history.

Going forward: export or back up your league’s match history periodically, and prefer tools that let you own the record rather than only view it through one vendor’s app.

6. When the Provider Comes Back Online

Once your rating provider is restored, reconcile rather than assume everything synced cleanly:

  • Spot-check that matches recorded during the outage window show up correctly once the provider is back, and follow up with the provider directly on any gaps.
  • Keep your own scores and standings as the source of truth for your league — treat the rating sync as a bonus, not the record.
  • Let players know the situation is resolved, and note if anything (like older ratings or specific matches) is still being sorted out.

The Takeaway

A rating provider going down is inconvenient, not disqualifying — as long as your league’s actual operations (schedule, scores, standings, communication) don’t live entirely inside that provider. Build your season so DUPR, or any other rating service, is one input among several, not the single point of failure for your whole year. For the latest on what’s known about this specific incident, see the DUPR outage explainer. If you want the fuller argument for why any single rating provider is a point of failure worth designing around, we lay it out in our case for portable, transparent pickleball ratings.

If you’re setting up a season and want scheduling, scores, and standings that don’t depend on any outside rating provider, create a free VolleyForge organizer account or reach out and we’ll help you get a league or tournament running — organizers in the Kansas City area can see it live at the Kansas City pickleball hub.