The National Lottery app and website have gone down across the UK amid a global IT outage.
National Lottery said it was investigating after thousands of users reported being unable to access results or buy tickets ahead of Saturday night’s draw.
Customers were reporting issues accessing the National Lottery app as well as the website since around 8pm on Friday, according to outage website Downdetector, with complaints peaking at more than 2,800 on Saturday morning.
It comes as a botched software update brought down tech infrastructure worldwide, although it is not clear if the lottery’s issues are linked to the outage. The massive disruption to Microsoft systems has included flight delays and cancellations, as well as impacting hospitals, banks, supermarkets and millions of businesses.
On Friday night, National Lottery said in a post on X: “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.”
In an update issued on the social media platform on Saturday morning, National Lottery apologised for the disruption and said the website and app are now back online. It wrote: “Our website and app are now back online! If you continue to experience access issues, please re-load and try again. Thanks for your patience and sorry for any inconvenience caused!”
Players aired their frustration at the incident on social media, with some disputing that the website and app are now back up and running.
One user wrote on X earlier: “Come on @TNLUK your app and website are down, this has been going on since 9pm last night. The fact it’s still not resolved after all this time is ridiculous.”
Another said on Saturday afternoon: “App and site [have] not [been] working for many hours, @TNLUK telling people on Twitter it’s fixed when it clearly isn’t – farcical behaviour, farcical cust[omer] service and farcical communications to the players of the UK’s national lottery.”
It comes as IT experts warned it could take weeks for systems to fully recover from the global IT outage.
Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, warned it could take “weeks” for all computers and systems to be fully restored. “In some cases, the fix may be applied very quickly,” he said. “But if computers have reacted in a way that means they’re getting into blue screens… that could take days and weeks.”
The chief executive of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company whose update crashed Microsoft Windows systems, said he was “deeply sorry”.
George Kurtz said it was not “a security incident or cyber attack”, and that a defect was found in a “single content update for Windows hosts”.
National Lottery operator Allwyn said: “The National Lottery website and Mobile Apps are available so players are able to purchase tickets and check results. Retail services were unaffected. Our technical teams are continuing to monitor service and investigate the cause of the outage.”