Lotto NZ has work underway to upgrade the MyLotto website and app, which is due to be completed by early 2021.

The significant project has been underway since 2019 and involves a $25 million technology investment, says Lotto NZ Chief Executive Chris Lyman.

'To support the move to online play, and the big increase in the number of people playing online, Lotto NZ is making a substantial investment in the upgrade of MyLotto. The current website is ageing, and the upgrade is required to meet higher demand online,” says Chris.

'While this work is underway we have been making interim improvements. However, regrettably there have been some issues on MyLotto. This has in turn resulted in some pretty poor customer experiences, and for that I sincerely apologise.”

The work to upgrade MyLotto will ensure the back-end processes are more robust, and able to deal with higher traffic on the site. Lotto NZ is also planning a full replacement of its gaming system in 2024.

'Planning is underway for further work in 2024 to replace our entire gaming system. The timing and costs are still being worked through, however this work will cover a full replacement of the back-end gaming system that supports MyLotto, and also includes our terminals in retail stores.”

Chris is making assurances that the integrity of Lotto NZ's games have not been impacted by the recent issues on MyLotto.

'While we have had some issues with slow processing speeds, and poor customer experience, I can provide absolute assurance that the integrity of our games have not been impacted."

Lotto NZ has seen a surge in online players since March, with the number of people playing online increasing by 33 per cent.

'We have significantly more people buying tickets online now than ever before. Nearly 200,000 people have registered to play online since 25 March – to put this into perspective, this is the number of new online players we would expect over a two-year period, not four months.

'This week alone 32,000 people have registered to play online, with around half of those from the Auckland region.”

Prior to the lockdown in March, 25 per cent of Lotto NZ's sales were online and 75 per cent were in-store.

'For last night's $50 million draw around 40 per cent of sales were online. We sold around 2.5 million tickets for Saturday night's draw, and over a million of those were online. This is the most tickets we have ever sold online. This slowed down our processing significantly, and unfortunately led to delays.”

Chris says the reason why MyLotto cannot open until later on Sunday is because all of the winning tickets need to be processed first.

'What's really important is that we pay our winners their prizes – and there are a lot of winners! In fact we've never had so many. Not only did ten players share the $50 million prize, but hundreds of thousands of other people won prizes across all of our divisions."