MegaMillions winning numbers announced

(CNN) — [Breaking news update at 9:04 p.m.]

The numbers drawn Tuesday night were 69, 45, 61, 3, 49, and the Mega Ball was 9.

Tonight’s potential record jackpot is worth $667 million.

[Previous story, published at 5:39 p.m.]

Good people of America, the lottery jackpots need to be stopped. They are getting too powerful.

Tuesday’s Mega Millions drawing is worth a record-setting $667 million, and Wednesday’s Powerball jackpot stands at $345 million. Together, that’s more than a cool billion dollars. The Mega Millions drawing is the largest in the game’s history and the third largest in the US Lottery jackpot history.

The reason these jackpots have ballooned to such monstrous proportions is because, well, no one has won in a while. According to a release from Mega Millions, the last Mega Millions jackpot was won July 24, netting 11 co-workers a combined $543 million. The last Powerball jackpot, which totaled $245.6 million, was won August 11 by a man in Staten Island, New York.

Believe it or not, this week’s combined billion-dollar haul is not the biggest prize in the lottery’s history. That honor goes to a 2016 Powerball jackpot, which clocked in at $1.586 billion (although it was shared by three winners).

Of course, the actual amount you’ll win is considerably less than a billion dollars, not just because of taxes and annuities and fine print things. The amount you will win is likely $0, because the odds of winning either jackpot are one in several hundred million.

Sure sure, someone needs to win eventually, we know. But it’s not going to be you.*

*OK, almost certainly not. But cheer up! There are often secondary prizes to these huge drawings that can be worth millions of dollars, and a shocking amount of them go unclaimed — probably because people get too focused on the biggest possible way to win.