The National Lottery hit an unexpected jackpot of technical troubles on Saturday as both its website and mobile app went offline, leaving thousands of hopeful players unable to access their accounts or purchase tickets.
Thousands of users began reporting outages around 8:30pm on Friday night, according to Downdetector.
This disruption comes just a day after a global IT outage caused widespread chaos across the UK, affecting airports, businesses, NHS services, and broadcasters.
However, it remains unclear whether the lottery's current issues are connected to yesterday's larger technical meltdown.
A spokesperson for the National Lottery addressed the situation on social media platform X, saying: "We are aware that some players are having issues accessing our website and app. Apologies for the inconvenience, our team are currently investigating the issue to find out what has happened."
The National Lottery's technical issues follow a major global IT outage that occurred on Friday. This widespread disruption was traced back to an update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which caused numerous Windows PCs to crash, displaying the infamous "blue screen of death."
Crowdstrike's founder, George Kurtz, later clarified that the problem stemmed from a bug in the update rather than a cyber attack. He stated, "A fix had been rolled out, but it would be 'some time' before all systems returned."
The severity of the situation was underscored by industry experts, who cautioned that a full recovery could take "weeks."
