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Red-faced organizers of the 2010 Winter Olympics postponed Saturday's ticket sale for Canadian residents to Nov. 14 because the computer system crashed.
More than 100,000 tickets to events at Vancouver area venues were available first-come, first-served on Vancouver2010.com at 10 a.m. A virtual waiting room was supposed to regulate the expected heavy demand on the Tickets.com system. But a news release issued at 1:14 p.m. blamed "difficulties with the configuration between the virtual waiting room and the ticketing transaction site."
"On behalf of Tickets.com, we sincerely apologize," said company CEO Larry Witherspoon in the news release.
VANOC ticketing vice-president Caley Denton claimed "a couple hundred" tickets were sold by phone. An equivalent number will be pulled from the Olympic family contingency pool and added to the Nov. 14 inventory.
"We are disappointed that people waiting to purchase tickets today did not receive the chance to do so," Denton said. "This is the first time we have had such an issue."
Many who tried were never able to log-in to their accounts, according to postings on Twitter. Those that did get through reported their screens freezing or crashing when they got to ticket-ordering pages.
Most were greeted by a notice asking customers to "please try again later" because of "a higher than usual number of visitors to the website." Callers to the toll-free ticket hotline were greeted with a recording that cited "network difficulty."
"You'd think VANOC would have the online ticketing system fixed by now. Instead, even in phase 3, the system is crashing endlessly," said a Tweet by Drafted_Boy.
Added bah33: "Good riddance to VANOC and your stupid ticketing site."
Tickets.com is a California-based Major League Baseball subsidiary that beat Ticketmaster for the contract in 2007. Isolated problems were reported when tickets went on sale through a lottery in November 2008 and on first-come, first-serve in June 2009.