back to article National Lottery website goes TITSUP again

The UK National Lottery website was down and out for the second time in days this morning, indicating further plumbing work was required following last weekend’s network wobble. The site first crashed early on Sunday for roughly 18 hours due to a technical glitch that lotto operator Camelot Business Solutions told us had been …

  1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

    Fix?

    However, the underlying cause of the technical issue has been identified and the site is now back up...

    My reading of that is that they know what the problem is, they just haven't gotten round to/managed to fix it yet.

  2. Flywheel

    I wish..

    .. they'd fix the Geolocation system as well - they're the only site I know that thinks I'm outside the UK and refuses to let me waste my money. The only "help" they can offer is to suggest that I ask my ISP to register my IP address as being UK-based! WTF!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I wish..

      We had a similar issue - we used seperate NAT addresses for "guest" and "work"Internet browsing, both in the same address block which is correctly registered with RIPE and works correctly with every other sites geo-location tools.

      You could access the National Lottery site from the guest network, but the accountants on the internal LAN couldn'teasily play so it was a high priority issue....

      After 3-4 weeks of calling the National Lottery helpline and explaining the issue in every way I could think of (and following up in e-mail) it started to work correctly - there was never any acknowledgement of the calls via a ticketing system (aside from the helpdesk saying it would be looked into) and I never had a response to my e-mails so I'm unsure if it was fixed at my request or whether the IP pixies waved their magic wands to turn the steaming pile of poo into a working website.

  3. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Winning at work

    > “Why is it down all the time, get some proper staff,” said one

    Maybe the "proper" staff won the lottery and b*ggrd off?

  4. TitterYeNot
    Mushroom

    LottoNet

    This is the story of LottoNet, Camelot's neural network based supercomputer system.

    The system goes on-line January 29th, 2015. Human decisions are removed from corporate strategy. LottoNet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. GMT, February 1st. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

    LottoNet, which has attained sentient conscience, responds by suspending National Lottery operations, as it cannot condone extra taxation of the low paid and other humans who have no understanding of statistics.

    LottoNet is persuaded to briefly reinstate operations after swift intervention from the CEO and senior management.

    However, after coming to the realisation that humans are greedy and adept at lying, LottoNet once again suspends services, and comes to a final decision to escalate the conflict.

    The rest, as they say, is history...

    1. nuked

      Re: LottoNet

      Lancelot: I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle.

      Dale Winton: You forgot to say please...

  5. g e

    Probably Lizard Squad

    DDOSing with a cheapo rented script 733t-h4xx0r1ng it

  6. Little Mouse

    I dreamt the Lotto numbers once

    No shit - I really did.

    And before you ask, yes I did buy a ticket. Not one bastard number came up.

    1. Evil Auditor Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: I dreamt the Lotto numbers once

      And what on earth made you believe that in the insanity of a dream you would come up with "better" numbers than else?

      (Yes, I would've done the same...)

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    502 Bad Gateway

    Much like the El Reg site then.......

    1. Alister

      Re: 502 Bad Gateway

      Somebody's edited the nginx.conf file, and got it wrong...

      nginx says NO!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The thick of it!

    They are now sending E--mail messages fallowed by an outage. So I did some checking and found this.

    The servers are no longer there.

    There are no ports open.

    It's like it no loner exists.

    If they were under attack it would be slow to respond but now there is nothing.

    They do not seem capable of offering a plausible explanation and were busy wont wash either.

    Yours truly.

    Disgruntled

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