Camelot says National Lottery website hit by DDoS attack

UK National Lottery operator Camelot has apologized to players after the Lottery website was knocked offline Saturday by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The National Lottery website went dark for over 90 minutes on Saturday night, preventing punters from purchasing tickets for that night’s drawing by either desktop or mobile apps. The Lottery’s official Twitter feed offered “sincere apologies” while directing players to the 46k retailers who were “unaffected” by the snafu.

The following day, the Lottery confirmed that the outage was due to a DDoS attack, which was “experienced by many companies.” In mid-September, thousands of sites around the globe reported receiving ransom demands from a group of DDoS extortionists calling themselves the Phantom Squad. It’s unknown at present whether the Lottery was among those targeted by this group. Ireland’s National Lottery site was targeted in similar fashion last year.

No one ended up claiming that night’s £14.4m main lottery prize, marking the sixth week in which the big prize had rolled over to the following week. Players are increasingly dissatisfied with Camelot’s controversial decision two years ago to add 10 balls to the National Lottery’s original 49, which tripled the unlikelihood of anyone claiming the main jackpot.