Powerball's Giant Jackpot of 2016 Crashed Florida Lottery's Website
Players buy tickets for the Ohio Lottery's Powerball game on Wednesday. PHOTO: CNN
The $500 million jackpot for last Wednesday night’s Powerball drawing crashed the Florida Lottery's website, according to department spokeswoman Shelly Gerteisen.
The site was down until noon on Thursday.
No one won the big prize — it will increase to $700 million for Saturday’s drawing.
But two Floridians matched five numbers in the game, reported the Miami Herald.
One lives in Dunedin and the other in Fort Lauderdale. They’ll each bring home $1 million in winnings.
By noon Thursday, the website was up and running, although it loaded slowly.
Lottery officials said there was “really, really high traffic,” but did not say exactly how many people tried to log in to floridalottery.com to see if they had the winning numbers.
After the problem surfaced, officials reached out through Twitter and Facebook to relay information.
Many people turned to the lottery's social media sites, if only to complain about the outage.
“PowerBall broke your website AND your iPad app. Maybe throw some money towards your IT dept?” Mark Harris of Tampa tweeted.