National Lottery postpones midweek draw for first time in 28 years
The problem arose when retail systems were not able to connect due to a glitch with its 3G supplier, Telefonica in Spain
Print5 February 2015
The National Lottery was forced to postpone its €10 million midweek draw yesterday due to a major technical problem.
For the first time in 28 years, the midweek Lotto draw will take place on a Thursday evening instead of a Wednesday.
Up to 3,500 retailers had problems with their ticketing terminals and as a result thousands of customers were unable to purchase their tickets.
Customers who did manage to purchase tickets yesterday have been reassured they will be honoured for tonight’s draw.
Premier Lotteries Ireland (PLI), who signed a license to operate the National Lottery for the next two decades last year, said that it appeared the problem arose when retail systems were not able to connect due to a glitch with Telefonica in Spain.
Speaking this morning (04/02/15) on RTE’s ‘Morning Ireland’ programme, the group’s director of marketing Eddie Banville said the outage was outside their control.
“We were very disappointed that this disruption inconvenienced our players and our retailers but this particular issue was entirely outside of our control,” said Banville.
“It happened on the worse day because we had a jackpot of €10 million which is the biggest jackpot we have had in quite some time.
“So in order to provide players with access to the system to play the game, we’ve extended the draw time until 7.45pm this evening.”
Banville said he was confident the same thing would not occur today.
He also said that yesterday’s issue had nothing to with problems some retailers and agents are claiming they are experiencing with National Lottery terminals.
Some retailers have claimed the terminals themselves have been causing problems since they were brought in last December.
A representative from PLI told ShelfLife earlier this month that they were engaging with retailers and that the problems were not as bad as had been reported.
He said: “96% of all transactions have been going through on agent terminals within less than two seconds, while a further two per cent are going through in under three seconds. There are a number of minor issues, but the overwhelming majority of agents are not experiencing problems. In some very rare cases, agents have had to reboot their systems. The problems at retail level are not in any way as significant as have been claimed.”
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