National Lottery website and app goes down one day after global Crowdstrike outage

The National Lottery is 'investigating' after users reported the website and app were not working today.

It comes a day after the global IT outage saw massive disruption at airports, train stations, businesses and the NHS.

It is unclear whether the issues are related at this stage.

The National Lottery said on Twitter/X: 'We are aware that some players are having issues accessing our website and app.

'Apologies for the inconvenience, our team are currently investigating the issue to find out what has happened.' 

Thousands of people have reported issues with the website after receiving error messages loading the website. 

A message online read: 'Our online services are temporarily unavailable.

'Sorry about that - we'll get you back in the game as soon as possible.'

The app says: ‘Sorry, our app is unable to load for you.’ 

According to DownDetector, recording outages worldwide, issues have been ongoing since around 9pm Friday.

The app has recorded more than 2,000 reports of the site not working for users at the time of writing.

It comes after a flawed software update by American cybersecurity company Crowdstrike caused global disruption yesterday, causing chaos at international airports and NHS patients to be turned away as outages hit GP surgeries.

IT experts were battling overnight to finish bringing healthcare, financial and travel companies' systems back online after they were crippled by the faulty update early on Friday. 

George Kurtz, the founder and chief executive of Crowdstrike, told NBC's Today Show he was 'deeply sorry' and said the issue was 'very quickly' identified and 'remediated'.

He said the issue was caused by a bug in a single update.

Issues were felt from India to the United States, Britain and New Zealand. Kurtz assured customers 'remain fully protected' after the outage.

Russian officials reported little disruption, warning against 'foreign software substitution'.

'CrowdStrike has not provided any services in Russia since February 2022,' Mikhail Klimarev of the the Internet Protection Society NGO told Reuters.

Russia has been heavily affected by Western sanctions since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

Disruption continued in the UK on Saturday, with huge jams amassing in Dover after flights were axed, leaving many thousands turning up at bust ports.

Some 167 flights scheduled to depart UK airports were axed on Friday, with others delayed, while 171 flights due to land in the UK were cancelled, following the technical glitch. 

Aviation analytics company Cirium said 5,078 flights - or 4.6 per cent of those scheduled - were cancelled globally on Friday, including the 167 UK departures. 

Many will not be able to return home until Wednesday after the outage impacted as many as 300 million computers worldwide.

Experts have suggested the error, which hit Microsoft systems, will cost the global economy trillions.