Even with an extra hour of sleep, Americans seemed to prefer checking on the $1.9 billion Powerball jackpot rather than immediately logging into work on this Monday morning. The drawing of the largest national lottery prize is scheduled for 10:59 p.m. EST today, and it seems to be breaking the internet.
This morning, the Powerball site was a bare-bones home page, with its media center entirely offline. The site primarily showed the Guinness World Records-setting $1.9 billion total.
That may be happening because the Powerball site reportedly crashed yesterday under the weight of increased traffic from Americans interested in the biggest Powerball jackpot ever. (The current jackpot beats the world record for the largest national lottery prize – which Powerball held with its nearly $1.6 billion total in January 2016. That’s even above the nearly $1.4 billion Mega Millions jackpot won in July 2022.)
Meanwhile, today’s Powerball jackpot is outperforming traffic from July’s Mega Millions run.
That run resulted in lottery ticket app Jackpocket becoming the No. 1 entertainment app in the App Store, Peter Sullivan said to Bonus today.
Sullivan, Jackpocket’s founder and CEO, further told Bonus today:
Jackpocket had its best week ever, with weekly sales 23% higher than the last record in July.
Finding Powerball Numbers Before Buying Tickets
Meanwhile, Powerball-related pages Bonus are experiencing their own increased traffic. That’s especially true of the Powerball Lottery Generator page, which helps ticket buyers pick numbers.
Using the baseline date of Aug. 4, the day after the last winning Powerball jackpot, hits on that Bonus page increased by nearly 5,000% on Saturday. The exact rise, of 4,992%, illustrates that most traffic occurs on the day of a lottery number drawing.
Even so, Powerball Lottery Generator page visits as of noon EST today were already 1,366% above what they were for the entire day of Aug. 4.
Even accounting for Daylight Saving Time, a record-breaking number of Powerball jackpot hopefuls are searching the web today, ready to break the internet.
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