The National Lottery draw is to go ahead at 7.45 tonight after a telecoms outage rendered terminals across the country unable to process entries. Tonight’s jackpot is €10 million.
According to a statement from Premier Lotteries Ireland – the company responsible for operating the National lottery – some 3,500 terminals were brought down between 9am and 6pm yesterday.
The cause of the outage has been traced to the 3G infrastructure provider by Spanish company (and former owner of O2 Ireland) Telefonica. The exact cause has yet to be disclosed.
The delay marks the first time a draw has been moved forward due to technical issues in over 30 years of operation.
This latest headache for Premier Lotteries come on the foot of complaints by retailers that new terminals bought in from Greek company Intralot were unreliable and did not work with scanners used for verifying winning tickets.
Speaking to the Irish Times, retailers reported having to manually reboot machines to get them working. Customer service was also criticised with some calls to help desks going unanswered. A software patch was subsequently issued.
Speaking on RTE Radio One’s Morning Ireland today, director of marketing Eddie Banville said he was “disappointed” by the outage and that it was “outside of our control”. At time of writing 90% of terminals were back online.
Banville said he was confident the draw would go ahead this evening and denied the incident was related to the new terminals.
Banville promised a full investigation would be carried out to ascertain why the draw had to be put off.
Premier Lotteries was awarded a 20-year contract to maintain the National Lottery last December.
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