Beijing organisers admitted they had underestimated the demand for the second batch of tickets for the 2008 Olympics after they were forced to suspend sales when the system crashed.
The allocation of the 1.85 million tickets ground to a halt after the website received 20 million hits in the first three hours of sale on Tuesday and the process was formally suspended in the early evening.
‘The Beijing Olympic Ticketing Centre underestimated the peoples' enthusiasm for the Games. We sincerely apologise to the general public for the inconvenience,’ director of the centre Rong Jun told a news conference.
In addition to the millions of applicants swamping the website, the call centre received 3.8 million calls and lengthy queues formed at the 1,000 designated branches of the Bank of China, Rong said.
‘All this exceeded the processing capacity of the system,’ he added. ‘It was due to the database processing, not the bandwidth. We need to improve the database capacity.
‘We are negotiating with the technical staff for a more comprehensive system.’
The website had a capacity to deal with one million hits an hour, Rong said, while the booking system should have been able to sell 150,000 tickets an hour.
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.
‘We did not provide satisfactory work,’ it read in part. ‘We will provide a reasonable solution to the problem and hope the public continue to support our work.’
Only 43,000 tickets were allocated on Tuesday and new guidelines on the sale of the remaining 1.8 million are to be issued next Monday.
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.
Rong would not be drawn on whether there would be a return to the lottery system to avoid the overload.
Seven million tickets for the 8-24 August Games will be made available to the general public with nearly three quarters reserved for mainland China residents.
