The Olympic ticketing website crashed temporarily on Friday morning, barring people from a second chance at securing tickets for the event. A 10-day first-come, first-served chance to pick up 2.3 million unsold tickets began at 6am this morning, but immediately hit problems due to a surge in demand. Colin Rowland, Senior VP from OpTier, comments on the importance of the IT infrastructure supporting the ticketing process.
Summer 2012: all eyes will be on London as our capital plays host to the world for the Olympic Games. But the crowds start much earlier online.
When tickets first went on sale back in March, 8.8 million tickets were sold over a 6 week period, but this time there’s only 10 days to snap up those precious tickets and the first come first served policy has led to the website buckling under pressure from huge customer demand.
It’s often hard to anticipate demand, but the Olympic Games is a major event in British history and the website has unfortunately fallen at the second hurdle!
With such massive demand for tickets and so much pressure to get it right, the IT supporting the online transaction process needs to be absolutely fool proof.
The experience for 2012 starts when visitors apply for tickets. All too often, over-stretched IT systems let ticketing websites down when IT systems become overloaded due to mass demand. Monitoring end-user experience in real time and proactively tackling potential performance issues before they impact the public will be crucial for delivering world-class experience as the starting pistol fires for the Olympic Games.
By Colin Rowland
Senior VP
OpTier
www.optier.com/