LYNN — Many lottery lovers in Lynn and beyond were disappointed on Monday when state lottery machines went down for several hours.
Lottery sales in Lynn are among the highest of any municipality in the state, ranking in the top 10 on an annual basis, but Monday numbers dwindled when lottery terminals went offline for more than five hours.
Barry Calvani of Cal’s News Store at 53 Central Ave. said he noticed the machines were down around 10 a.m.
“Usually, they tell us if the system will be down for a little while,” said Calvani, who quickly found out that the whole city was experiencing the same situation.
He has received a number of calls from customers, asking if his computers were off because they were not able to buy lottery tickets online.
“It happens quite often, said Duke, manager of the D&M Mart on Broadway. “It goes down for a few minutes or half an hour.”
He waited until about noon and got worried. Duke called the Massachusetts State Lottery (MSL) and received a response that the whole state of Massachusetts was experiencing the same issue and that they were trying to fix it.
Duke had to turn away a few customers, but they were understanding. The store loses a small commission from such issues.
“I am not too upset about it. There is nothing we can do about it,” said Duke.
Calvani spent his morning manually cashing tickets of small value from regular customers because he knew where the tickets originated from.
“Then when the machines come up, I have to validate the ticket,” Calvani said.
This manual process slowed him down, and he wasn’t able to do any online ticket sales but he still was able to do instant tickets.
“The lottery doesn’t really lose any business,” Calvani said. “People that couldn’t play their tickets in the last few hours will have to wait and play them when the computers are back online.”
The MSL put out a short message on its website and Twitter account at 12:57 p.m. that the lottery terminals were affected by telecommunications issues.
“We are working with our vendor to resolve this issue. Thank you for your patience,” the message said.
Later in the afternoon, Calvani got the word that the MSL was switching its computers to a backup system. According to the MSL spokesperson Christian Teja, the service was restored at about 3.30 p.m., but he was not able to provide any additional information on what had caused the blackout at the time of publication.
