02-08-2025
National Lottery goes offline in high-stakes upgrade
A team of IT experts will be on red alert this weekend as the National Lottery is plunged into a two-day blackout as part of the biggest technology overhaul in its 31-year history.
The Gambling Commission, whose job it is to ensure one of Britain's biggest sources of charity donations is properly run, has assembled a team of people to supervise a complex upgrade scheduled to last 36 hours.
A spokesman for the commission said. 'We will have colleagues working over the full period to closely examine updates from Allwyn as this important change is implemented.'
Meanwhile, the number of agents taking calls on the National Lottery hotline will treble on Sunday and be four times the usual number on Monday in case of any major glitches. The number of engineers on duty will double.
The state of readiness follows months of scrutiny over Allwyn's faltering stewardship of one of Britain's largest public sector contracts.
The company, owned by Czech billionaire Karel Komárek, has encountered repeated problems as it attempts to fulfil a pledge to modernise the technology that underpins the lottery.
A succession of setbacks has led to a fall in sales and profits, reducing the amount of money handed over for charitable causes.
In March, The Telegraph revealed that the lottery was facing a £2bn shortfall in donations in its maiden year under Allwyn. When Allwyn took over the fourth licence it made an ambitious promise to more than double donations from £17.9bn under predecessor Camelot to £38bn.
Players have been told that they will be unable to check tickets or numbers in shops across Britain from Saturday evening until Monday morning while the lottery's systems are offline.
Online accounts, the National Lottery website and its phone app will also be down. The update is set to take place immediately following Saturday's Lotto and Thunderball draws.
Allwyn's UK chief has hailed the changeover, in which the lottery's gaming and retail systems will be transferred to new platforms, as a world-first.
'There isn't anywhere in the world that this scale of project has ever been done. No other retailer has 43,500 stores,' Andria Vidler said recently.
'This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver the National Lottery that the UK deserves. We're making unprecedented and much-needed changes, which will move us closer to achieving our vision for The National Lottery,' she added this weekend.
The upgrades include the delivery of more than 30 new systems and the transfer of tens of thousands of retailer records and millions of transactions. In the build-up, 10 weeks of technical rehearsals have been carried out.
