The National Lottery says it is investigating after users reported being unable to access its app and website.

Both its website and app appeared to be offline today – a day after the global IT outage led to widespread disruption at airports, businesses, the NHS and broadcasters.

Downdetector received thousands of reports of outages beginning around 8.30pm on Friday night.

It is unclear if the issues facing the lottery are connected to Friday’s outage.

In a post on X, the National Lottery said: “We are aware that some players are having issues accessing our website and app.

“Apologies for the inconvenience, our team are currently investigating the issue to find out what has happened.”

The global IT outage that began on Friday morning was caused by an update from global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which knocked many Windows PCs offline with a “blue screen of death” appearing on monitors.

The company’s founder later confirmed it was caused by a bug in the update and not a cyber attack, as some had feared.

George Kurtz said a fix had been rolled out, but it would be “some time” before all systems returned. An industry expert warned it could take “weeks” for a full recovery.

A five-year-old boy has been able to leave his home for the first time in six months after he received a stem cell transplant made from a baby’s umbilical cord blood which was donated in 2008.

Gunner Lewis-Vale, from Shropshire, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder in March 2021, when he was about 17 months old.

At the time, his parents Holly and Jamie Lewis-Vale, both 34, were told that without a transplant, the toddler would only live for a year or two.

But after a previous transplant from a donor in Germany failed, Gunner found a match with stem cells that were donated to NHS Blood and Transplant in 2008 and frozen with liquid nitrogen vapour at -150C.

He underwent the surgery in January and then had to isolate for six months to give his immune system time to produce enough white blood cells to fight infection.

But now Gunner’s life has transformed as he enjoys the summer with his seven-year-old sister Daisy.

Mrs Lewis-Vale said: “So far, we have ventured to the park, skate park, dog walking, school runs for his big sister and out to feed the ducks.

“Gunner’s cheeky personality is coming right back. He’s a clever boy with an amazing bond with his big sister.”

Gunner has mucopolysaccharidosis type I hurler syndrome, a rare inherited condition that prevents the breakdown of certain sugars in the body.

The build-up of sugars can cause problems with physical and mental development.

The first symptom Gunner showed was a pushed-out belly button, which was due to sugars building up in his liver and spleen.

“We are eternally grateful to the incredible mother who donated their baby’s umbilical cord,” Mrs Lewis-Vale added.

“The new white blood cells from the donor will hopefully make the enzyme he lacked which breaks down sugar.”

Gunner’s family are now encouraging more people to register as stem cell donors.

Guy Parkes, head of stem cell donation and transplant at NHS Blood and Transplant, said: “We’re delighted to see Gunner playing outside for the first time since he received his stem cell transplant from a cord blood unit donated to our NHS cord blood bank.

“Stem cell transplants are only possible thanks to the generosity of donors and we thank the mother who chose to donate her baby’s umbilical cord more than 10 years ago. We wish Gunner and his family all the best.”

A new film that uses virtual reality (VR) technology to immerse users in the acid house party movement in 1989 has started its tour of the UK in Birmingham. 

The film, In Pursuit Of Repetitive Beats, sees the user become a character in a scene where, before mobile phones were available, party-goers listened to pirate radio for a number to call to find the secret location for a warehouse rave on the outskirts of the West Midlands.

Users are fitted with a VR headset and a haptic suit which allows them to feel vibrations.

They have two hand-held controllers that allow them to hold and pick things up in the virtual environment.

Interviewees who contributed to the project include pirate radio DJs, ravers, MCs and police officers who were tasked with identifying where the warehouse parties were taking place in order to shut them down.

Lee Fisher, who was a pirate radio DJ who performed at some of the parties, said that the search for the locations was one his strongest memories of the events.

“I guess my memory of those warehouse parties, first of all, was finding out about them,” he says in the film.

He continues: “Then the kind of excitement of finding the location, then is the party going to happen, or is the party going to get closed down?

“And then going through that kind of that whole cycle of anxiety to finally getting into this space and then there’s just a release of adrenaline.”

Tim Godwin, a retired West Midlands police officer, was seconded to the force’s acid house squad in the late 1980s.

“The responsibility of the squad was to gather intelligence, disrupt activity and try and gather evidence to prosecute individuals involved,” he says in the piece.

He adds: “We would have a radio set… we would be listening to the same messages that people who wanted to attend the event would be listening for, so we would be listening for locations or phone numbers, or indications of meeting points.”

“Sometimes they would give a false location so you could get to the other location without the police attending,” says Vicky Dixon, one of the film’s contributors.

The film aims to shine a light on the West Midlands as a key part of the emergence of British dance music culture, according to its director, Darren Emerson.

“A lot of people are celebrated when it comes to the emergence of acid house and rave culture. You hear a lot about London, you hear a lot about Manchester and even places like Blackburn. But actually the West Midlands is a real important place, a real pioneering place for this type of music,” he said.

The experience is one of a range of VR films that create a 360-world around the user to try and bring imaginary environments, or memories, to life.

Using VR technology to recreate environments in history raises questions about accuracy but there are ways around this, according to Sylvia Xueni Pan, professor of virtual reality at Goldsmiths, University of London.

“There are different ways to actually recreate history, and obviously, if you actually recreate anything from your memory or from reading material from pictures, you are doing it with your own subjectivity,” she said.

She added: “But technically, there are ways to actually scan some real objects or find data that you have stored historically and try to recreate those objects more realistically.

“You’re really trying to simulate from real data rather than trying to recreate it. So there might be a compromise between both methods.”

In Pursuit Of Repetitive Beats, which was produced by East City Films, will be available to experience in a number of cities across the UK over the next year, including Belfast, Cardiff and Brighton.

The NHS has warned of “continued disruption” to GP services into next week following the global IT outage – as airline passengers reported lengthy delays and lost baggage this weekend.

The outage spread globally on Friday morning after an update from global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked many Microsoft Windows PCs offline with a “blue screen of death” appearing on screens.

The company’s founder confirmed it was caused by a bug in the update and not a cyber attack, as some had feared.

NHS England reported its systems were “coming back online in most areas” on Saturday afternoon but were “still running slightly slower than usual”.

A spokesperson said: “As practices recover from the loss of IT systems on Friday, there may be some continued disruption, particularly to GP services, in some areas into next week as practices work to rebook appointments.”

There was also significant disruption to pharmacy services on Saturday.

Nick Kaye, chair of the National Pharmacy Association, said systems were “by and large back online and medicine deliveries have resumed in many community pharmacies today”.

But he added Friday’s outage “will have caused backlogs and we expect services to continue to be disrupted this weekend as pharmacies recover”.

“We urge people to be patient when visiting their local pharmacy and some may be still prioritising those patients with emergency prescriptions from their GP surgery,” he said.

Experts have warned it could take weeks for systems to fully recover and problems at airports were being reported on Saturday.

Andrew Evans, from Taunton in Somerset, said he had been waiting more than nine hours in Palma de Mallorca airport and claimed there had been little communication from airline operator TUI.

His flight, bound for Exeter, was due to take off at 2.05am local time (1.05am UK time) but passengers had still not boarded at around 10.30am local time on Saturday morning.

“Our holiday has absolutely fallen apart at the end – it feels like we are abandoned,” Mr Evans said.

“We went to the carousel but there was nothing there. We still haven’t got our luggage.”

Passengers on a Ryanair flight from Bristol to Portugal reported arriving at the holiday destination to find that no checked-in baggage had been loaded on to the plane.

On Friday, some 167 flights scheduled to depart from UK airports were cancelled, while 171 flights due to land in the UK were axed.

TUI said its IT systems “remained unstable” and apologised to passengers, adding: “We understand how disappointing this would have been and recognise that many customers were already at the airport waiting for their departure.”

The Port of Dover said early on Saturday that it was dealing with “hundreds of displaced” airport passengers and urged customers to ensure they had a booking before arrival.

It is understood that the port was not a victim of the global IT outage.

Doug Bannister, head of the Port of Dover, said: “We operate a turn-up-and-go system here. However, we do insist you have a book on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down.

“The greater visibility we have the better.

“But we are here to service people who want to travel. So I would say to displaced airport passengers ‘come on down. We have the capacity’.”

The National Lottery app and website were down on Saturday – although it was unclear if this was connected to the global IT outage.

The travel delays come as thousands of families start to embark on summer holidays amid the end of the academic year for many schools.

Indie rock group Bombay Bicycle Club announced the rescheduled date of a music festival performance they missed due to the global IT outage.

The British group were due to play Poolbar Festival in the Austrian town of Feldkirch on Friday but missed it due to a cancelled flight.

The show is now going to take place on Sunday, the band said.

Travellers around the world are facing a second day of chaos in the aftermath of Friday’s global IT outage. 

Here, Sky News looks at what you can do if you’re affected by the disruption.

Air passengers

Friday was meant to be one of the busiest days of the summer as families jetted off on holidays at the end of the school year.

But more than 300 flights to and from the UK were cancelled, with many more suffering significant delays, while others reported lost baggage.

The bad news is that as the global IT outage was an extraordinary circumstance, compensation is not payable for flight delays or cancellations.

Travel journalist Simon Calder told Sky News: “Unfortunately, if your flight is cancelled, then you don’t automatically get priority on the next one.

“What happens is that the airline gives priority to people already booked on the flights which are going, and then you have to kind of scramble around for the few remaining seats. And this weekend, there aren’t many of those.”

But Mr Calder assured passengers that “it’s very clear what the rules are”.

He added: “I’m hearing from [people] in various parts of the world being told various things by various companies, including, ‘Oh, well, we haven’t got another flight for three days, so you’re just going to have to wait’.

“That’s complete nonsense. Under air passenger rights rules within Europe, if your flights are cancelled, then the airline has to get you to your destination as soon as possible.

“If that means the airline has to spend hundreds of pounds buying a seat on a rival airline, well, that’s just tough. That’s what the rules say.”

However the global nature of the IT outage means it may be difficult to get airlines to abide by the rules.

The travel expert said package holiday companies give travellers more protection than “a DIY trip”.

“If you’re on a package holiday, you have rock solid consumer protection,” he added.

“The organisers, the airline has to get to [the] destination as soon as possible. If they really have pulled the plug and said, ‘okay, your trip’s cancelled’, well, I’m glad to say that there are still – even at this late stage – plenty of holidays around.

“So [the passenger] will be able to book a different holiday, hopefully to the same destination with a different provider. Going to see a good travel agent would be a very good way to sort that out.”

If your package holiday is curtailed, and resulted in you missing a day or two of the trip, Mr Calder says: “You should be entitled to get a proportion of the cost of your holiday back because, there you were in Birmingham when you were hoping to be in Benidorm.”

But airlines do have a duty to take care of passengers caught up in the chaos.

Mr Calder said airlines should provide vouchers for hotels and food but if they don’t, passengers should pay and claim back with an itemised receipt.

He offered an important tip for the receipts, saying: “They don’t want to see any alcohol on that meal bill, thank you very much.”

Rail passengers

While most trains are running across the country, there have been short-notice changes and cancellations.

Refunds and compensation are due once a train is late. Most operators will issue compensation for a 15-minute delay, others 30 minutes.

If your journey is cancelled, you are entitled to a full refund.

Customers have to get a claim submitted within 28 days. Keep the journey ticket to send it in as proof.

Crossings at the Port of Dover

Port of Dover authorities said on Saturday it was dealing with “hundreds of displaced” airport passengers and it had a 30-minute processing time just after 11am.

The processing time had been 60 minutes earlier this morning.

It advised customers to have a booking for the crossing before arriving.

The authorities also asked customers to have their documents ready to ensure “the quickest possible processing time through border controls and check-in”.

Disruption caused by the global IT outage has continued this weekend as airline passengers reported long delays and lost baggage, while pharmacies tried to deal with a backlog in medicine deliveries.

The outage spread globally on Friday morning after an update from global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked many Microsoft Windows PCs offline with a “blue screen of death” appearing on screens.

The company’s founder confirmed it was caused by a bug in the update and not a cyber attack, as some had feared.

Experts have warned it could take weeks for systems to fully recover and problems at airports were being reported on Saturday.

Andrew Evans, from Taunton in Somerset, said he had been waiting more than nine hours in Palma de Mallorca airport and claimed there had been little communication from airline operator TUI.

His flight, bound for Exeter, was due to take off at 2.05am local time (1.05am UK time) but passengers had still not boarded at around 10.30am local time on Saturday morning.

“Our holiday has absolutely fallen apart at the end – it feels like we are abandoned,” Mr Evans said.

“We went to the carousel but there was nothing there. We still haven’t got our luggage.”

Passengers on a Ryanair flight from Bristol to Portugal reported arriving at the holiday destination to find that no checked-in baggage had been loaded on to the plane.

On Friday, some 167 flights scheduled to depart from UK airports were cancelled, while 171 flights due to land in the UK were axed.

TUI said its IT systems “remained unstable” and apologised to passengers, adding: “We understand how disappointing this would have been and recognise that many customers were already at the airport waiting for their departure.”

The Port of Dover said early on Saturday that it was dealing with “hundreds of displaced” airport passengers and urged customers to ensure they had a booking before arrival.

It is understood that the port was not a victim of the global IT outage.

Doug Bannister, head of the Port of Dover, said: “We operate a turn-up-and-go system here. However, we do insist you have a book on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down.

“The greater visibility we have the better.

“But we are here to service people who want to travel. So I would say to displaced airport passengers ‘come on down. We have the capacity’.”

The National Lottery app and website were down on Saturday – although it was unclear if this was connected to the global IT outage.

The travel delays come as thousands of families start to embark on summer holidays amid the end of the academic year for many schools.

Meanwhile, there was also significant disruption to pharmacy services on Saturday.

Nick Kaye, chair of the National Pharmacy Association, said: “Systems are by and large back online and medicine deliveries have resumed in many community pharmacies today after the global IT outage.

“However, yesterday’s outage will have caused backlogs and we expect services to continue to be disrupted this weekend as pharmacies recover.

“We urge people to be patient when visiting their local pharmacy and some may be still prioritising those patients with emergency prescriptions from their GP surgery.”

Indie rock group Bombay Bicycle Club announced the rescheduled date of a music festival performance they missed due to the global IT outage.

The British group were due to play Poolbar Festival in the Austrian town of Feldkirch on Friday but missed it due to cancelled flight.

The show is now going to take place on Sunday, the band said.