Website and app completely offline, players unable to buy or cash tickets

By Kate Northrop

In what is being dubbed the largest IT outage in history, the U.K. National Lottery may have fallen victim to the "Blue Screen of Death" update over the weekend, after their website and mobile app were completely taken offline, leaving thousands of players unable to cash or buy tickets.

A severe global IT outage caused by a botched CrowdStrike update jammed up emergency services, healthcare, technology, and transportation industries worldwide, grounded flights, and may have even brought the U.K. National Lottery's digital operations to a grinding halt.

"Our online services are temporarily unavailable," a screenshot of the Lottery's website read. "Sorry about that – we'll get you back in the game as soon as possible."

On the app, users were greeted by a message that said, "Sorry, our app is unable to load for you."

The issue began when CrowdStrike, a United States-based cybersecurity technology company, pushed a buggy software update at 4:09 pm UTC, which caused its clients' Windows operated computers to crash everywhere around the world. CrowdStrike "remediated" the update about an hour later, but at that point, it was too late. Computers were stuck on a "blue screen of death," a critical error screen displayed when the operating system of a computer can no longer operate safely, and many businesses' systems came to a screeching halt.

According to DownDetector, which tracks outages worldwide, thousands of users submitted reports of issues with accessing the National Lottery's website and app between Friday, July 19 and Saturday, July 20 with complaints reaching well over 2,800 reports at a time on Saturday morning.

"We are aware that some players are having issues accessing our website and app," the Lottery posted on X Friday night. "Apologies for the inconvenience, our team are currently investigating the issue to find out what has happened."

U.K. players were unable to check numbers, buy tickets, and submit claims for winnings online on Friday evening and Saturday morning. On the night the outage occurred, the Lottery was offering a £44 million (US$56.9 million) EuroMillions jackpot with ten guaranteed millionaires. Players were, however, able to visit one of the Lottery's 40,000 physical retailers to buy 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," an Allwyn spokesperson said.

Lottery Post and its ability to provide results were not impacted by the CrowdStrike outage.

Technology experts surmised that it could take days or weeks for some businesses to recover their computers and systems.

Thankfully, the Lottery announced on Saturday morning that the website and app were back online and apologized for the disruption. Some players reported lingering problems with the website and app, with many taking to social media to directly address the Lottery's official accounts.

"Come on @TNLUK your app and website are down, this has been going on since 9pm last night," one user said on X. "The fact it's still not resolved after all this time is ridiculous."

"App and site not working for many hours, @TNLUK telling people on Twitter it's fixed when it clearly isn't — farcical behavior, farcical cust[omer] service and farcical communications to the players of the UK's national lottery," another user complained.

Lottery Post Founder and developer Todd Northrop emphasized that many are wrongly shifting the blame to Microsoft since it is the Windows operating system that was felled by the outage.

The global IT catastrophe, Northrop explained, stems back to a lawsuit the European Union filed against Microsoft in 2007, in which the European Commission accused Microsoft of monopolizing competition with its dominant position in the market.

"Part of the settlement forced Microsoft agree to allow third-party software companies access to its low-level sensitive areas of the operating system so that these third parties could construct security software for the operating system itself," Northrop said.

As a result, Northrop continued, a third-party company could essentially "blow up the operating system" with a buggy update, and that is how a cybersecurity company like CrowdStrike was able to disrupt computers running on the Windows operating system worldwide.

CrowdStrike CEO said that the event was not "a security incident or cyber-attack."

The National Lottery is continuing to monitor their services and investigate the outage.

"The National Lottery website and Mobile Apps are available so players are able to purchase tickets and check results," National Lottery operator Allwyn said in a statement. "Retail services were unaffected. Our technical teams are continuing to monitor service and investigate the cause of the outage."