The winning Mega Millions ticket for the $1.28 billion (£1.05 billion) jackpot was sold in Illinois, but the winner is still unknown.
“There is one jackpot winning ticket that was sold in Illinois,” Marie Kilbane, spokeswoman for the Ohio Lottery Commission, told The Washington Post.
The jackpot on the Mega Millions site now stands at $20 million.
This is the third time in two decades that the jackpot has topped $1 billion. According to Mega Millions, the one-time jackpot for Friday’s jackpot is estimated at $747.2 million. The winner can choose to take that or be paid the full jackpot in installments over 29 years, according to the BBC.
The winning ticket numbers were 13, 36, 45, 57 and 67, as well as a mega ball of 14. Interest was so high that the Mega Millions website became inaccessible due to the “high volume of traffic” after the 11pm draw on Friday.
The jackpot has reached record levels after 29 consecutive draws without a winner with a ticket containing all six winning numbers.
The last winning ticket was sold in Tennessee when the jackpot was $20 million on April 15.
A ticket holder in the state won $2.9 million Tuesday for matching five numbers but didn’t get the mega number, according to the California Lottery. The jackpot at the time was $830 million.
The record jackpot won in Mega Millions lottery history was in October 2018, when $1.537 billion was won by a ticket holder in South Carolina.
The one-time payout at the time was $878 million, according to CBS News. The winner remained anonymous.
The jackpot also crossed the billion-dollar mark last year, when four members of a lottery club in suburban Detroit, Michigan, won $1.05 billion. They also remained anonymous.
Previous winners have purchased homes, settled debts and helped the areas in which they lived. But others have been wiped out from their gains as newfound wealth has led to anxiety and fear, The Post reported.
The Mega Millions lottery is played in 45 states, as well as in Washington, DC and the US Virgin Islands. Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah do not participate.
A ticket holder’s chance of winning Mega Millions is about one in 303 million — they’re 70 times more likely to be killed by a shark and 216 times more likely to be struck by lightning this year, according to The Post.
Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman told the paper that the chance of someone winning increases when more people buy tickets.
“Once the pot reaches that range, there are enough people playing that chances are someone will pick the right numbers,” he said.
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