The grand prize for the US Mega Millions lottery, scheduled for Friday, exceeded the billion dollar mark, making it the fourth largest prize of its kind ever, according to what the organizer of this game announced.
The value of the jackpot for this lottery has been increasing for more than three months, and with it the dreams of the participants grow, while no one has succeeded in guessing the six correct numbers in the last 29 drawings.
After Tuesday night’s withdrawal, the Mega Millions website experienced a technical outage that lasted about two hours due to the heavy traffic, according to the group.
The largest prize in the history of the lottery was $ 1,586 billion, and was won in January 2016 in the other major American lottery, the “Powerball”, but the amount was divided among three winners.
The potential winner of Friday’s raffle could get $1 billion if he agreed to split the payments over 30 years.
If he wanted to receive his prize in one go, he would only get $603 million, part of which would be deducted from taxes, according to MegaMillion’s estimation.
Mega Millions was launched in 2002, and its formula has been modified several times to reduce the probability of winning the jackpot, increasing the odds of regularly accumulating the prize to hundreds of millions of dollars.