Montana Lottery halts Millionaire game after system failure

Lines formed at convenience stores across Montana on Sunday morning, but the registers did not print. The annual Montana Millionaire game, a raffle-style lottery that has grown in popularity, faced a sudden halt shortly after 5:30 a.m. when terminals began displaying error messages. Players who had arrived early found their transactions blocked by a system that could not process the volume of requests.

Lottery director Bob Brown stated that the state and its vendor, Bally’s Intralot, had conducted extensive testing on a new central gaming system installed earlier in the year. Brown noted that the system was tested at a rate approximately double the highest previous sales volume for the game. Despite this preparation, the infrastructure encountered performance issues due to the sheer number of transactions attempted in the first minutes of the sale.

Retailers initially attempted to restart the sales process, believing a simple fix might resolve the issue. However, the problem persisted, and the lottery officially postponed the game around 11 a.m. By that time, 12,919 tickets had been sold at the $20 price point. This figure represented a fraction of the 720,000 tickets available for the drawing.

The partial sales created an unusual distribution of instant winners. More than 2,000 of the sold tickets won immediate cash prizes, including 991 for $100 and 1,019 for $500. This represented a win rate of roughly one in six, far higher than the expected one in 74. Brown confirmed that all instant wins would be honored and that the sold tickets remain valid for the final drawing scheduled for December.

To maintain fair odds for customers who will purchase tickets when the game reopens, the lottery will add additional instant wins to the remaining pool. This adjustment will require the state to pay out up to $600,000 more in prizes than originally planned. Brown indicated that Intralot will cover this additional cost. He described the vendor’s decision as a step to do the right thing by the public.

Brown acknowledged that the delay caused frustration for customers who waited in line. He suggested that the lottery could have stopped sales sooner but maintained that they acted based on the best available information at the time. The director declined to provide a specific timeline for resuming sales, emphasizing the need to allow retail partners and the public adequate time to prepare.

The Montana Millionaire game has seen increasing demand in recent years. In 2025, the 620,000 available tickets sold out in just over six hours. Brown expressed confidence that the system will be stable for future sales, stating that it will undergo multiple successful test runs before being put live again.

The state is currently working with Intralot to test the fix for the technical issues that caused the Sunday shutdown. No new date for the resumption of ticket sales has been announced yet.