Montana Millionaire tickets sold during outage will remain valid for December drawing

Montana Lottery officials confirmed on Monday that the 12,919 tickets sold during Sunday's technical outage will remain valid for the final drawing in December. Customers who purchased these tickets at $20 each before the system failure were told to keep them, as the games they won will be honored in the final raffle.

The disruption occurred shortly after 5:30 a.m. on Sunday when terminals across the state stopped printing tickets. Many screens displayed the error message "Transaction not allowed." Lottery director Bob Brown stated that the central gaming system experienced performance issues due to the high volume of transactions. The game was officially postponed around 11 a.m. after initial attempts to resolve the error failed.

A disproportionate number of the tickets sold during the brief sales window were instant winners. More than 2,000 of the 12,919 tickets issued were winners, with 991 paying out $100 and 1,019 paying out $500. This represented a win rate of roughly one in six, compared to the standard odds of one in 74.

To ensure that customers purchasing tickets after the game reopens have the same odds of winning an instant prize, the Lottery will add more instant wins to the remaining pool. This adjustment requires the state to pay out up to $600,000 more in prizes than originally budgeted. Brown said that Bally's Intralot, the state's vendor, will cover this additional cost.

Brown explained that the state and Intralot had conducted extensive testing prior to the launch. He noted that the team tested the new central gaming system, which was installed earlier this year, at a rate approximately double the highest recorded sales for Montana Millionaire. Despite this preparation, the system could not handle the actual transaction load.

Brown acknowledged that the decision to wait before postponing sales was difficult. He said the team initially believed simple fixes could restore service, but hindsight suggests they could have stopped earlier. He apologized for the inconvenience caused to customers who waited in line for hours before the official announcement.

The lottery is currently testing the fix to the performance issues before bringing the game back online. Brown said the system must work multiple times in testing before it is put live. He did not provide a specific timeline for resuming sales, stating that the agency wants to give retail partners and the public sufficient time to prepare.

The raffle-style game has seen increased popularity in recent years. In 2025, 620,000 tickets sold out in just over six hours. Sunday's available pool was 720,000 tickets, of which only 12,919 were sold before the shutdown.