UK misses out on £43.9m jackpot

The biggest individual lottery prize was £197.4m, won in the US

Britons have missed out on the National Lottery's biggest jackpot, with a player in Switzerland winning the £43.9m EuroMillions prize.

The jackpot led to a 400% surge in UK ticket sales before Friday's draw.

The jackpot was the largest to date in the weekly draw, for which tickets sell in Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, France, Luxembourg, Spain and the UK.

National Lottery operator Camelot said "one mystery player" in Switzerland had "just become very, very rich".

The total jackpot was £43,960,693.

The winning numbers were 7, 11, 25, 31, 50 and the Lucky Stars were 3 and 1.

Camelot said next week's EuroMillions jackpot would be an estimated £10m.

Previous records

The biggest jackpot pool in the domestic National Lottery was in 1996, when the jackpot had rolled over to reach £42m. But the prize that week was split between three ticket-winners.

The National Lottery's biggest single jackpot prize was the £22,590,829 won by Paul Maddison and Mark Gardiner in 1995.

But the largest lottery jackpot competed for anywhere in the world was for $350m (£192m) in the US in May 2000. Two tickets shared the Big Game lottery prize.

The largest individual lottery win was also in the US, where Andrew Whittaker won $314.9m (£197.4m) playing Powerball in 2002.