Lotto candidates who bought their tickets to the $10 million Powerball draw online on Saturday night could face a nail-biting wait for the results, as MyLotto was not open until Sunday morning.
A post on the Lotto website says that this weekend the systems behind MyLotto and the Lotto NZ app – where players can purchase tickets – are undergoing an upgrade.
This meant that the site would close at 7:30pm on Saturday and customers would not be able to log into MyLotto to purchase or check tickets, or claim prizes until the site reopens on Sunday morning.
The process for claiming a prize over $1000 would also be different this weekend.
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Once MyLotto reopens on Sunday, players can log in as usual and check their tickets. But if they have won a big prize, they will not be asked to fill out an online prize claim form.
LOTTO
Online Lotto customers will have to check their results the old fashioned way, with MyLotto undergoing an upgrade.
Instead, a member of Lotto’s winners care team would contact them directly.
Prizes of $1000 and under are automatically deposited into players’ MyLotto wallets as usual.
Lucy Fullarton, Lotto NZ’s head of corporate communications, said the upgrade had been in the works for some time and would support the “big increase in demand” for online gaming that they had seen from customers.
One of the reasons for the timing of the upgrade was because after the draw they had to go through a “number of activities” to process tickets, and doing so on Saturday night allowed them to complete these activities and transfer to the new system as far as possible before the next draw.
The other reason was that it allowed them to minimize the amount of ticket information they needed to switch to the new system, as Saturday’s draw would have closed and customers would not have bought tickets for the next draw yet.
Lotto
You can still find the winning numbers online – or tune in to Lotto host Sonia Gray.
“We know our customers love to log in after the live draw to check their tickets, and we understand that waiting is frustrating, so we thank them for their patience,” she said.
For online customers who might be “desperate” to check their results on Saturday night, an option was to screenshot their ticket and check the numbers the old-fashioned way, as they would with a paper ticket.
While they wouldn’t be able to log in, customers could still find the numbers on the website or watch the live draw at 8pm on TV1.
Once the work was done, customers could expect the look and feel of MyLotto and the Lotto NZ app to remain largely the same as the upgrade was only to the back of the platform.