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A scene from the latest Lotto ad. National Lottery
BALLS UP
The National Lottery is "very confident" tonight's draw will go ahead
It could be you. Of course, statistically it won’t… But they’ve fixed the machines – so that’s good.
THE NATIONAL LOTTERY is “very confident” tonight’s postponed draw will go ahead.
That’s according to the lottery’s director of marketing Eddie Banville, who told Morning Ireland issues with ticket machines yesterday had been addressed.
A service outage meant newsagents’ machines were offline all over the country yesterday.
In a statement last night, the National Lottery confirmed the scheduled Wednesday night draw was being cancelled:
To ensure all our players have an opportunity to play for the €10 million Lotto jackpot, the Lotto draw will now take place on Thursday 5 February 2015. Tickets already purchased for the midweek draw remain valid for this draw.
The fault was due to a service outage “related to the 3G telecommunications infrastructure provided by Telefónica” the statement said.
Speaking this morning, Banville said agents were back online by 6pm yesterday, but that the run-in to the rollover draw was extended to allow more people to play.
He said he had been speaking to the network providers this morning and that at 6am all agents were still online, and communicating with the central system.
“This particular issue was entirely outside of our control,” Banville said.
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