STM Lottery Boosted Peak-Time Resilience

STM Lottery Sdn Bhd — Malaysia’s sole licensed national lotto operator — aims to deliver always-on digital experiences, even when traffic surges during major jackpot draws. When a record-breaking event and costly scraper activity triggered site slowdowns and visibility gaps, the company turned to Akamai. With Akamai App & API Protector, it gained resilience, clarity, and control over its web apps and APIs while maintaining stable, real-time results delivery during its most demanding periods.

As Malaysia’s leading multi-channel lottery operator with 680 outlets offering eight games, STM Lottery depends on its website and mobile app for live draw results, big-win information, and its popular scan-and-check feature. “Controlling result distribution and protecting our official channels is critical to maintaining customer trust, regulatory compliance, and brand integrity,” explained Lai You Weng, Assistant General Manager of IT for STM.

On draw nights, digital usage peaks, and traffic regularly climbs to 50,000 requests per minute over a four-hour window as players check lottery results. These spikes, often intensified by bot and scraper traffic from unauthorized sites, strained STM Lottery’s infrastructure and threatened site stability. “Our visibility into scraper and bot traffic was limited,” Weng continued. “We couldn’t easily distinguish legitimate users from automated activity.”

The outages drove an uptick in scrutiny from players, agents, and partners, reducing their confidence in STM Lottery. “When we delivered our first major lottery event, the site crashed,” said Weng. “Even operators couldn’t update results from the back end.”

With its infrastructure hosted on AWS, STM Lottery relied on AWS WAF alongside its on-premises firewalls and network security solutions to protect its lottery system, website, and applications. But the setup became increasingly difficult to manage — and failed to address STM Lottery’s requirements.

Key limitations included complex rule management, fragmented monitoring, and limited attack mitigation. According to Weng, the STM team could monitor overall traffic through AWS and on-premises logs, but found it difficult to differentiate real users from bots and malicious traffic. “This made it challenging to proactively block unwanted traffic or understand its full impact on performance and security,” he said.

As scraper and bot traffic increased, site performance slowed during peak periods. “To address the additional server load, we had to scale our infrastructure — and that raised our operational costs,” explained Weng.

The team needed a security layer purpose-built for live events, high concurrency, and unpredictable traffic bursts.

STM Lottery selected Akamai App & API Protector to secure its web applications and APIs, and to gain real-time insight into traffic anomalies across its AWS-hosted infrastructure. “Akamai offered improved visibility into traffic, reduced latency during peak lottery periods, and a more streamlined approach to managing security rules across both on-premises and cloud systems,” said Weng.

In collaboration with its managed services partner, Nutworkz, STM Lottery’s IT team and network security personnel — along with Akamai specialists — completed the rollout on schedule, in just weeks. Together, they all collaborated on traffic routing, rule configuration, testing, monitoring, and optimization to ensure minimal disruption to the lottery operator’s website during the deployment. “Nutworkz continues to manage and monitor our environment, maintaining robust Akamai security, proactive threat management, and performance enhancements to ensure a secure and seamless digital experience,” continued Weng.

Since going live with Akamai, STM Lottery achieved major advances in uptime, performance, and traffic clarity. Pages loaded faster during draws, bad bots and scraping attempts were blocked, and draw-night infrastructure remained stable even through heightened jackpots. “Performance improved almost immediately, with faster result delivery during peak periods,” said Weng.

During the company’s second-largest jackpot event, traffic rose 10–15 times higher than normal. “Our system stayed stable,” he continued. “Akamai handled the traffic spike seamlessly, and kept everything running smoothly. We didn’t experience any interruptions or slowdowns.”

STM Lottery also gained much better visibility into bot and scraper traffic, allowing it to proactively protect its systems and ensure a smooth player experience. “Akamai effectively mitigated bot and scraper activity,” explained Weng.

Faster pages, uninterrupted availability, and consistent results delivery strengthened STM Lottery’s reputation across digital channels. “Akamai significantly reduced negative social media feedback during peak periods,” said Weng. “Customer confidence improved because our platforms stayed responsive.”

Plus, with only legitimate traffic reaching origin, the lottery operator lowered lower infrastructure scaling demands and reduced operational costs 10%–15%.

As STM Lottery continues to modernize and scale its digital services, it expects to deepen its use of Akamai solutions for stronger edge security, improved traffic handling, and more efficient content delivery. “Akamai will help us deliver faster results, protect against evolving threats, and maintain a seamless experience, even as we grow,” concluded Weng.