UK National lotteries operator Camelot was forced to apologise after a DDoS attack brought down their servers a few hours before the draw.

A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDos) is when multiple systems become compromised as a result of them being overloaded, either in terms of their bandwidth or a single targeted system.

The attack come an hour and a half before the draw was to be made, meaning that those attempting to purchase tickets online just before the lottery was drawn were unable to do so. The attack left some people outraged after the jackpot rolled over for the sixth week in a row.

An apology was later issued on Twitter. The National Lottery commented: "We're very sorry that many players are currently unable to access The National Lottery website or app. Our 46,000 retailers are unaffected. Please accept our sincere apologies if you were unable to play tonight’s games due to the website issue that affected many players."

The DDoS attack does draw light on the dangers which many gaming operates with online vectors face and is not the first time a lottery has been targeted. The Irish National lottery suffered a similar attack last year. It is apparent that cyber security is a huge threat.

Camelot, the company who operates the UK National Lottery, will be hoping that Tuesday night’s EuroMillions jackpot of £167m will help people to forget the mishap.