After all the hype of the Rockies going to the World Series, tickets went on sale this morning at 10am.
At least they were supposed to. Tickets were only available online, not at Coors Field, or anywhere else. Myself and a few coworkers decided to try and get tickets. With no luck after an hour or so, we assumed that tickets were sold out. After 2 and a half hours, the Rockies finally announced that their servers had crashed and only a few people actually were able to buy tickets.
I understand that the load on the servers had to be phenomonal (doo-dooo-do-do-do), but how can the Rockies IT department not expect that? The minute they announced this weekend that tickets would only be available online, didn't they do the math?
Colorado's population is about 4.7 million people. Since baseball is "America's favorite sport", let's say that most are Rockies fans (a big assumption, but fair when planning for a big sale like this). Even if half the people want to go, we're still talking over 2 million people. All trying to log onto their site at once. In terms of web traffic, that's nothing (Youtube.com claims to have 100 million videos viewed a day). Does anyone remember the election fiasco in Denver last November? Shouldn't a lesson have been learned there?
After a little further research. It looks like the MLB contracted a company called Paciolan to handle online ticket sales. Paciolan "experienced a system wide outage that is impacting all of their North American customers."
Hopefully Paciolan isn't head quartered in Denver. Sucks to be them right now. I have to wonder how many people took the day off to get tickets today and probably won't get any. I sense a large number of sick people tomorrow...
Monday, October 22, 2007
Dropping the Ball
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4 comments:
ROFLMAO...I love how you refused to make a new sports tag - but only relented to "Sports other than hockey."
Yeah, I guess there were people of the pissed off variety lined up outside Coors Field. Seriously, if anyone had ever told me in March that I'd be paying attention to what was happening in baseball in October, I'd have decked ya in the mouth and called ya a liar...
I hate the fees Ticketmaster charges but unfortunately for big concerts and events its the only way to go. When Garth Brooks announced his concerts in KC, he kept adding shows and eventually sold 140,000 tickets in an hour through ticketmaster. The fees suck but at least it can be done. MLB.com tried to take it all in house and it has been a cluster, theres always virtual waiting rooms and crap, its awful
And now the Rockies are saying that tickets have been suspended until firther notice.
And the official number of hits - "over 8.5 million hits". A number I still say is a pittance in web traffice for something this big.
Roland - I had to relent a little since I still felt like blogging again about it.
Train - I hear ya, TM sucks the big one. However, at least you can rely on the system working, most of the time.
Just saw an article about Ticketmaster acquiring Paciolan, the company that choked this morning.
Wonder how that deal is going now?
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