CHINA: Chinese enthusiasm to buy an Olympic ticket crashes system

Olympic ticket sales are cancelled as ticket system fails under sheer demand for tickets. Beijing organisers admitted on Wednesday (October 31) they had underestimated the demand for Olympic event tickets. The second batch of tickets came up for sale on Tuesday but the system crashed within hours of the ticket launch. The Web site received 20 million hits in the first three hours of sale on Tuesday and the process was formally suspended in the early evening. "When we reached the second phase, although we had prepared we didn't predict that enthusiasm to buy tickets would reach such heights. From the current technical analysis it's not a broadband width problem, the width of the band was enough. The main problem is related to the system database's ability," said Rong Jun, head of the Olympic Ticketing Centre. In addition to the millions of applicants swamping the Web site, the call centre received 3.8 million calls and lengthy queues formed at the 1,000 designated branches of the Bank of China. "I think that at the moment the most important thing is to solve this problem, to come up with a solution as soon as possible so that we can resume the ticket sales to the public at the earliest stage. In terms of responsibility, we will act on the basis of the technical appraisal," said Rong Jun. The Web site had a capacity to deal with one million hits an hour, Rong said. The booking system should have been able to sell 150,000 tickets an hour but the organisers had underestimated the nations enthusiasm, queues for tickets began as early as 2.30 am on Tuesday morning. Rong said organisers were aware that many people had taken a day off work and made other sacrifices to try to buy tickets and read out a letter of apology to subscribers. The first batch of 1.6 million tickets were allocated by lottery earlier this year so this was the first chance for China's 1.3 billion people to buy tickets on a first come, first served basis. Seven million tickets for the Aug. 8-24 Games will be made available to the general public with nearly three quarters reserved for mainland China residents.

ITN Source | November 1, 2007

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