Winning lottery ticket sold in Maryland; are there more?

A winning Mega Millions ticket for Friday’s record $640 million drawing was sold in Maryland, lottery officials said early Saturday, and other winning tickets might also have been sold.

The winning numbers are: 02-04-23-38-46. The Mega Ball is 23.

Carole Everett, spokeswoman for the Maryland Lottery, said the winning Mega Millions ticket was purchased at a retailer in Baltimore County. She said it’s too early to know any other information about the lucky ticket holder or whether others were sold elsewhere in the nation.

“We’re thrilled,” she said. “We’re due and excited.”

The estimated jackpot dwarfs the previous $390 million record, which was split in 2007 by two winners who bought tickets in Georgia and New Jersey.

Americans wagered nearly $1.5 billion on the longest of long shots Friday. As sales of the tickets soared throughout the day for what could be the biggest single lotto payout in the world, the state’s new online lottery website creaked under the strain.

The new state website was down for about 30 minutes Friday afternoon for “maintenance” and gave some users error messages while trying to buy tickets, officials said.

“It’s a little slow loading,” lottery spokeswoman Adrian Otto said. Online lottery sales at www.illinoislottery.com debuted last Sunday, making Illinois the first state ever to offer lottery tickets online.

For an idea of how brisk sales were in the hours ahead of the drawing, Illinois retail locations sold just over $2 million worth of tickets between 4 and 5 p.m. Friday — and $12.8 million for the day. That daily total translated to 33,333 tickets sold a minute.

During the same hour-long window a week earlier, on March 21, hourly sales fell slightly shy of $62,400, said Elizabeth Leonard, spokeswoman for Northstar Lottery Group, the private firm that manages Illinois’ lottery.

Online sales Friday stood at slightly under $300,000 at 5 p.m., a third of the total sales volume for Mega Millions since the state lottery began selling tickets over the Internet on Sunday, she said.

“Clearly the load is being carried by our retailers right now,” she said.

The jackpot, if taken as a $462 million lump sum and after federal tax withholding, works out to about $347 million, with the jackpot odds at 1 in 176 million.

Thousands of players — who converged on convenience stores in 42 states and Washington, D.C., where Mega Millions tickets are sold — didn’t mind that they were 50 times as likely to get struck by lightning; about 8,000 times more likely to be murdered; and about 20,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than hit the lucky numbers.

“When people ask me, I just tell them that the odds of a lottery game make it a game of fate,” said Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Urbandale, Iowa-based Multi-State Lottery Association that oversees the Mega Millions, Powerball and other lotteries. “Just buy a ticket, sit back and see if fate points a finger at you for that day.”