Watch Now


Technical problems hit DAT load board; no time estimate on full service return

The DAT load board has been suffering technical problems since sometime Thursday morning, according to multiple sources and various statements coming from DAT.

“Our engineers are working to correct the issue ASAP,” DAT’s Joel Weiler wrote in a Facebook post in the Trucking: Rates & Lanes Facebook group. “Some users are able to login at this time, but still may be experiencing slowness. We will keep you posted.”

On Twitter, this is how DAT kept its followers up to date during the early afternoon. 

The DAT login screen at approximately 1:30 p.m. EST said the system was “currently experiencing a system issue with our Load Board service. Our engineers are working on it and we should be back shortly.”


Although the cause is unknown, the fact that the two biggest load board companies both went down for an extended period of time less than a month apart inevitably brings up thoughts of what happened to Truckstop.com just before Christmas. Truckstop later said it was a ransomware attack on its system that caused an outage that lasted several days. 

A call and email to DAT’s corporate communications department were not immediately returned.

John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.