Quote Originally Posted by TaleraRistain View Post
They could have coded it so "error" was just a null but nulls in coding can be seriously bad juju, so instead they coded the error case to return 0 as a default value and assign no winner. But the winners are still recorded on the lottery server and so they can retrieve that data and award the winners their prize appropriately. And they can fix the issue that caused the servers not to communicate so the issue doesn't occur again on future lotteries.
The analogy I've used in a few threads so far is that the lottery server has the list of winners, but when it called to to tell the placards who won, sometimes it got a busy signal... and just never left a message or called back. So for the placards it got through to, yay, the results are correct! For the placards it didn't get through to, it still has correct results stored on the lottery server, but it never got around to telling those placards.

What they need to do, in essence, is change things so that the lottery server can be told to basically retry any phone-calls that it didn't get through on, so as to actually tell the remaining placards who their winner is.