And not to worry about a different kind of strike - the one caused by US cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, whose routine update sparked a global IT crisis overnight - tonight’s draw went ahead as normal, a Lotto spokeswoman told the Herald.
“We’re fine. Our gaming system and our retail system is not affected.”
Each took $7.2m in the must-be-won draw on June 8, including one couple who only claimed their prize last week.
“Because we don’t buy tickets all the time, we usually only check our tickets when we remember to – we weren’t in a rush,” said the winning man.
A couple of weeks passed, and the man remembered the ticket, which was in his wife’s handbag for safekeeping. He dug it out and scanned it using the MyLotto App.
“The app told me I’d won a major prize and to take the ticket to a Lotto store. I wasn’t sure how much I’d won … but I had a feeling that it was a big amount.”
The man stashed their ticket back in his wife’s handbag so they could check it when they went grocery shopping the next day.
Before doing the shopping, they took their winning ticket to the Lotto counter.
“They told us we had won $7m – we were so excited,” he said.
Other Powerball jackpots won since then include $4.5m won by a MyLotto player in Waikato on June 12 and $5.5m won on June 19 by a physical ticket bought in Waitara.
Cherie Howie is an Auckland-based reporter who joined the Herald in 2011. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years and specialises in general news and features.