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back to article 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 …

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  1. Herby

    Lining up...

    ...to pay your "Stupidity Tax". Of course I do it as well here in sunny California. Thankfully my rate of payment for this silly tax amounts to around $50/year.

    It has been said that the odds of winning are the same weather you play or not, and I have actually proven it to be true. I've picked up a bunch of winning tickets just lying around that others have passed over. The first was one left on a copier that got me 5 bucks.

    Live and learn.

    I also note that when Comdex was up and running in Lost Las Wages Vegas, the locals didn't like it too much as the geeks didn't gamble too much, knowning the odds.

    2 2 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Lining up...

      "It has been said that the odds of winning are the same weather you play or not, [...]"

      Roll-overs apart - somebody has to win. Think of it as a chocolate bar - with about the same level of disappointment of expectations these days - but non-fattening.

      A couple of tickets a year still gives a proportion to charities - and a decent win would enable you to help your preferred charities considerably.

      0 2 Reply
  2. jake Silver badge

    Perhaps @TNLUK briefly had misgivings because ...

    ... the lottery is a tax on idiots who can't do math(s), and they were ashamed.

    But then common sense took over, and TNLUK will continue fleecing the populous.

    2 4 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "timestamps don't translate well"

    Hmmm. What's wrong with displaying a simple date+time (timezone_identifier) combination?

    Surely any sensible website is capable of doing that?

    0 0 Reply
    1. richardcox13
      Reply Icon

      Re: "timestamps don't translate well"

      Twitter displays the date/time of other's tweet's in your locale. Unless they are recent, then it displays something like "+20 min".

      Thus Vulture South would need to translate the offset into a local time, and then perform the timezone conversion, Neither difficult, but it was a Sunday :-).

      0 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Trollface

    Bets are

    The sysadmin won the jackpot and accidentally sprayed the servers with champagne.

    3 0 Reply
    1. Ogi
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Re: Bets are

      yeah "accidentally". Not like the sysadmin just won the jackpot and will not longer have to go back the next day to babysit old decrepit machines, eh? :-)

      ( I know which machine I would do it to in the DC, if I ever won a million )

      2 0 Reply
  5. Graham Marsden
    Boffin

    "Punters are grumpy about the outage because...

    "... it means they can't check to find out that they've most likely not won a prize or, if they do, they win £10 on a bet that should pay off at 57:1"

    FTFY!

    1 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Punters are grumpy about the outage because...

      The minimum prize is now £25 for three numbers, not £10.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Graham Marsden
        Reply Icon
        Happy

        @AC - Re: "Punters are grumpy about the outage because...

        Shows how long it is since I realised it was a con...

        0 0 Reply
  6. Captain Scarlet
    Paris Hilton

    On off button?

    Erm so it was fixed but they still thought it would take several hours to turn it off and on again?

    Edit: Blast its DNS related isn't it which could mean a few hours.

    /me facepalm

    1 0 Reply

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