National Lottery sleeps through Sunday

The UK National Lottery website seems to have done something nasty to itself on Saturday night, as it crashed out for much of Sunday.

We're not sure exactly when the site went down and it's hard to say exactly when the problem happened because the time stamps on the Tweets that tell the story don't translate well when read down here in Australia by Vulture South.

But so far as we can tell from the Lottery's own Tweets and http://www.isitdownrightnow.com's scrape of other social media, UK punters were complaining of the outage at least in the late afternoon. The outage may even have struck hours earlier, as some responses to the Lottery's Tweets about the problem mention several hours of downtime.

Here's the Lottery's own Tweets.

Apologies to those trying to access our website - we're working as fast as we can to fix a technical issue. Thanks for your patience. ^Amy

— The National Lottery (@TNLUK) February 1, 2015

Hi everyone, we've fixed the issue & the website is re-booting. It will be live again in a few hours. Thanks so much for your patience. ^Amy

— The National Lottery (@TNLUK) February 1, 2015

Hi everyone, the website is back. Good luck to all those who received the email...you can now log in and find out how much you've won! ^Amy

— The National Lottery (@TNLUK) February 1, 2015

Punters are grumpy about the outage because it means they can't check to see if they've won a prize. Core systems powering the outfit's games appear to operating normally.

The Lottery's blog and other social media outlets are silent on the outage and its causes. We've asked The National Lottery to explain itself, and await a response.

Updated A spokeswoman at Camelot Business Solutions, told us it discovered gremlins during routine maintenance work on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

"We encountered a technical issue which caused some of the processes to fail. This resulted in a fix needing to be implemented on Sunday afternoon before the site could be brought back up and running. The draws themselves on Saturday night were unaffected." ®