Fragile Technology

Millions miss out on UK lottery

Millions of punters across the UK were unable to purchase a ticket in the National Lottery due to a computer glitch. The Lottery's online sales system went down leaving people not able to buy tickets for Saturday's draw from shops, supermarkets and other outlets.

Camelot, which runs the National Lottery, said it had identified a "temporary issue" on its host system which was causing problems for retailers and "some online players".

It's been estimated that the loss of so much ticket income meant the eventual winner's prize was 800,000 pounds less than it should have been, due to the reduced prize pool.

Tickets went back on sale, but only shortly before the draw:

Lottery operator Camelot said the problem had been fixed around 90 minutes before the 7.30pm deadline to buy tickets.

Lottery Players Had No Chance of Winning

Some players in the Tennessee lottery had zero chance of winning for several weeks. An audit was conducted after one player noticed that for some time, numbers never appeared twice. Some $2million of tickets were affected - all due to a programmer who wrote code that prevented duplicate numbers being drawn. The lottery only recently changed to a computer draw from manual ping pong balls.

"The audit said the lottery did not have an in-house quality assurance program. There wasn't a third party to oversee the program. The lottery relied solely on the vendor."

Audit: Fraud Didn't Cause Lottery Drawing Errors