Here's a weird situation we don't encounter very often: For a little while this week, we weren't able to give our very biggest winners their prize checks. It was a strange feeling, to say the least!
On Tuesday afternoon and for a couple hours Wednesday morning, equipment outages here at lottery headquarters prevented us from being able to do some of our normal things, including printing winners' checks for those folks claiming prizes at our offices. All prizes of more than $600 have to be claimed at an Iowa Lottery office, so for the folks redeeming tickets during that timeframe, there obviously was a delay.
Today's modern technology is a wonderful thing, but it's definitely frustrating when electronic tools have outages. Even with the redundancies and other safeguards built into our systems, sometimes outages just can't be avoided, and that's what we saw for a little while this week.
Everything was restored by mid-morning Wednesday, allowing us to write the winners' checks that had been delayed and get back to business as usual.
Nothing was impacted at the retail level in the sale or cashing of tickets, it was just an issue at lottery offices. We've gotten checks out to all the winners involved along with our apologies for the inconvenience and some coupons so they can play on us next time.
And we're hoping technology will be our friend today!
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