The Nationwide Lottery app and web site have gone down throughout the UK amid a world IT outage.

Nationwide Lottery stated it was investigating after hundreds of customers reported being unable to entry outcomes or purchase tickets forward of Saturday night time’s draw.

Clients have been reporting points accessing the Nationwide Lottery app in addition to the web site since round 8pm on Friday, in line with outage web site Downdetector, with complaints peaking at greater than 2,800 on Saturday morning.

It comes as a botched software program replace introduced down tech infrastructure worldwide, though it isn’t clear if the lottery’s points are linked to the outage. The large disruption to Microsoft methods has included flight delays and cancellations, in addition to impacting hospitals, banks, supermarkets and tens of millions of companies.

On Friday night time, Nationwide Lottery stated in a put up on X: “We’re conscious that some gamers are having points accessing our web site and app. Apologies for the inconvenience, our group are presently investigating the problem to seek out out what has occurred.”

In an replace issued on the social media platform on Saturday morning, Nationwide Lottery apologised for the disruption and stated the web site and app are actually again on-line. It wrote: “Our web site and app are actually again on-line! In the event you proceed to expertise entry points, please re-load and check out once more. Thanks on your endurance and sorry for any inconvenience brought about!”

Gamers aired their frustration on the incident on social media, with some disputing that the web site and app are actually again up and operating.

One consumer wrote on X earlier: “Come on @TNLUK your app and web site are down, this has been occurring since 9pm final night time. The very fact it’s nonetheless not resolved in any case this time is ridiculous.”

One other stated on Saturday afternoon: “App and website [have] not [been] working for a lot of hours, @TNLUK telling folks on Twitter it’s mounted when it clearly isn’t – farcical behaviour, farcical cust[omer] service and farcical communications to the gamers of the UK’s nationwide lottery.”

It comes as IT specialists warned it may take weeks for methods to totally recuperate from the worldwide IT outage.

Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, warned it may take “weeks” for all computer systems and methods to be absolutely restored. “In some circumstances, the repair could also be utilized in a short time,” he stated. “But when computer systems have reacted in a manner meaning they’re moving into blue screens… that would take days and weeks.”

The chief government of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose replace crashed Microsoft Home windows methods, stated he was “deeply sorry”.

George Kurtz stated it was not “a safety incident or cyber assault”, and {that a} defect was present in a “single content material replace for Home windows hosts”.

Nationwide Lottery operator Allwyn stated: “The Nationwide Lottery web site and Cellular Apps can be found so gamers are in a position to buy tickets and test outcomes. Retail providers have been unaffected. Our technical groups are persevering with to observe service and examine the reason for the outage.”