HELENA — Montana Lottery leaders say they’re working to get their popular annual Montana Millionaire game back on track, after technical problems forced a delay in ticket sales Sunday.
Lottery director Bob Brown told MTN, leading up to the game’s opening day, the state and their vendor Bally’s Intralot had done testing of a new central gaming system installed earlier this year – and they believed they were ready for the huge volume of Montana Millionaire sales they were expecting.
“There's an immense amount of testing that goes in, every little aspect gets tested – and they tested for volume,” Brown said. “They tested at a rate that was approximately double the highest sales we've ever had of Montana Millionaire tickets.”
(Watch the video to hear more from the lottery director.)
But, shortly after sales opened at 5:30 a.m., terminals across the state stopped feeding out tickets. Many showed error messages, saying, “Transaction not allowed.” The Lottery announced later Sunday that the system experienced “performance issues” because of the large number of transactions.
Brown declined to give specifics Monday about the technical issues that led to the shutdown, but he said the state and Intralot have found a fix and are working to test it and make sure it’s ready before they bring the game back online.
"We do apologize that this went the way it did,” he said.
Many customers waited in line for hours before sales were officially postponed around 11 a.m. Brown said, working with Intralot, they initially believed there could be some simple fixes to resolve the issues, so they tried to bring sales back online before deciding the best option was to postpone.
“In hindsight, yeah, maybe you could have stopped sooner, but realistically, we did what we felt was right,” he said.
In the end, 12,919 of the $20 tickets were sold Sunday morning, out of 720,000 available. Of those tickets, more than 2,000 were instant winners – 991 winning $100 and 1019 winning $500. That’s a much higher percentage of instant winners than should have been expected – roughly one out of six, instead of one out of 74.
Brown said all of those instant wins will be honored, and the tickets sold Sunday will remain valid for the final drawing in December.
“Hang on to your tickets; don’t throw those out,” he said.
The Lottery says more instant wins will also be added back into the game, to ensure customers who buy tickets later still have the same odds of getting one. That means the state will have to pay out up to $600,000 more than expected in prizes. Brown said Intralot is going to cover that extra cost.
“I am encouraged by them stepping up and taking the steps to do the right thing by the people,” he said.
Despite the high-profile issues Sunday, when asked if lottery customers can be fully confident once Montana Millionaire reopens, Brown said yes. He said leaders are committed to testing until they’re sure the system is ready.
"It's not going to work once, it's going to work multiple times before it's ever put out live,” said Brown.
Brown wasn’t ready Monday to give a timeline for when the Lottery will resume Montana Millionaire sales. He said they want to give their retail partners and the public plenty of time to be ready.
The raffle-style game has become increasingly popular over the last few years. In 2025, 620,000 tickets sold out in just over six hours.
