Tickets in Texas, North Carolina and Puerto Rico had the winning numbers in Wednesday's drawing for a $564.1 million Powerball jackpot.
Sue Dooley, senior drawing manager for the Multi-State Lottery Association, told the Associated Press that the Puerto Rico ticket was the first Powerball jackpot winner ever sold outside the continental United States. Puerto Rico joined Powerball less than a year ago.
The winning numbers in Wednesday's drawing were: 11, 13, 25, 39, 54 and the Powerball 19.
Dooley had no immediate information on the specific locations of where the tickets were sold.
Should the winners select the lump sum option, each would get a one-third share of $381,138,450.16 before taxes.
The jackpot was the third-largest in Powerball history and the fifth-largest U.S. lottery prize. The jackpot now reverts to $40 million.
It had been nearly two years since a Powerball jackpot has grown as large as Wednesday's prize. That time, it was a $590.5 million jackpot won in May 2013 in Florida, a prize that ranked third on the all-time list.
The largest payout was to three ticketholders in the Mega Millions game, the other national lottery drawing. That was a $656 million prize won in March 2012 by players in Kansas, Illinois and Maryland.
In 2012, state officials who run Powerball and Mega Millions changed ticket prices and lowered the odds of winning jackpots in hopes the moves would increase the number of huge prizes and draw more players.
The new rules worked, causing jackpots to repeatedly climb to record levels. More than half of the top 10 U.S. jackpots have been reached in the past couple of years.
However, although prizes grew larger, there had been something of a jackpot drought, as ithad been nearly a year since a Powerball prize reached the giant number people have come to expect. That was in February 2014 when someone won $425.3 million. A Mega Millions jackpot reached $326 million in November, but that was the first huge prize since the game rose to $414 million in March 2014.
Lottery officials say it all evens out in the long run, but the lack of a huge prize caused a drop in ticket sales. That ultimately means less money for state government programs financed by the lotteries.
In the six months from July to the end of December 2014, Powerball had more than $1.6 billion in ticket sales. That compares to sales of $2.7 billion during the same period in 2013.