The National Lottery says self-checking Lotto machines won't be back in action until early April.

The new franchise owner, Premier Lotteries Ireland, says the delay is part of a transition to a new system.

“After 27th of February we will then make those ticket checkers available to be reprogrammed to be Tested and then to be introduced and we expect to be able to restore business as usual there by early April,” said Eddie Banville, Marketing Director with the National Lottery said.

The company has come in for criticism after technical problems caused last night's €10m Lotto draw to be postponed until tonight. There have been issues with self-checking machines at retailers since November.

“Just after 9 o’clock we had a major telecoms outage on our 3g network,” Mr Banville said.

A telecommunications problem saw 3, 500 lottery machines go down yesterday, meaning customers weren't able to buy tickets. As a result, the €10m jackpot had to be postponed.

"When the system went down 3,500 retailers on 3g network were affected as the outage “ meant their terminals weren’t able to communicate with our central system,” according to Mr. Banville.

Jonathan Healy asked how confident the National Lottery can be regarding the future stability of the system.

“I can’t really tell you how confident we are about the future until we’ve completed our examination of what went wrong,” Mr Banville said.

Banville said other recent technical problems are part of a change of system, which means services like self-checking won't be back online for some time. Listen to the full interview with Eddie Banville on Newstalk Lunchtime via the player below