6 Jan 2012

Olympic ticket re-sale site suspended temporarily

The London 2012 Olympic organisers temporarily suspend a website re-selling unwanted tickets following a host of computer problems.

Olympics - Reuters

The website opened on Friday morning for the first time to allow members of the public to buy tickets sold back to organisers at face value.

It reassured customers that it was “updating and refreshing the system” but later released a statement saying: “We have told Ticketmaster to suspend the resale system whilst they investigate some issues customers have been experiencing.

“We want buying and selling Olympic and Paralympic tickets through Ticketmaster to be a good customer experience, and so we will re-open the site once Ticketmaster have resolved these issues.”

Organisers said the problems were caused by tens of thousands of people trying to buy the tickets and a delay in those tickets being removed from the system once they had been purchased.

A spokesperson said that “lots” of tickets had been resold with demand far exceeding supply.

The problems sparked widespread complaints on social media sites.

Empty-handed

The resale window is open until 3 February, and a further one million ‘contingency’ tickets are due to go on sale in May.

Around 1.2million people, or two thirds of applicants, ended up empty-handed after the first round of ticket sales and the second round also experienced major issues.

This is not the first time Locog has been left embarrassed by ticketing issues. In June, the website crashed after being flooded by early risers trying to buy tickets in the second round of the process.

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