10.50AM UPDATE: There’s finally some good news! It appears after more than 8 hours of being offline, the National Lottery website is back online for the majority of users. Things appear to be running as normal with accounts working and tickets now able to be purchased via the website.
ORIGINAL STORY: No, don’t worry – it’s not just you. The National Lottery website and app really are down right now. The UK’s gaming platform is currently showing an error when heading online with users seeing a message that reads “PLEASE BEAR WITH US. Our online services are temporarily unavailable. Sorry about that – we’ll get you back in the game as soon as possible. The National Lottery Team.”
The gremlins appear to have started after last night’s Euro Millions game and are still ongoing. It’s unclear what is causing the issues and whether yesterday’s CrowdStrike glitch, which took millions of PCs offline due to a bug in a security update, has affected the Lottery.
DownDetector, which monitors outages across the world, is currently showing over 2,000 reports that the National Lottery is down making this a significant issue.
Along with not being able to get new tickets, players have also been angry as they can’t check how much they have won.
Lottery users have now taken to X (formerly Twitter) to vent their frustration with one player called Darren saying, “Got an email from The National Lottery saying I’ve won a prize, can’t see how much because the app and website are down.”
Another added, “National lottery app has been down since yesterday evening. Haven’t been very impressed with the new company who won the franchise from Camelot so far.”
And user Attila, simply asked, “The National Lottery app seems to be unavailable, so is the website, is the service down?”
For anyone who hasn’t yet got their ticket for tonight’s big game it’s clearly going to be a worry. Hopefully, the gremlins will be fixed in the next few hours and things will be running as normal before 7pm.
In a statement sent to Express.co.uk, a National Lottery spokesperson said: “Due to a technical issue, The National Lottery Website and Mobile Apps are currently unavailable. Our technical teams are working hard to resolve this issue as soon as possible. In the meantime, players can visit one of our 40,000 National Lottery retailers to purchase their tickets and check results.
“If players have purchased tickets or have a subscription via The National Lottery website, we would like to reassure them that these are valid and have been entered into draws. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused by this issue.”