The ticketing system operated by a California company has been unable to process World Series ticket sales for Colorado Rockies fans, and those baseball fans are not happy about it.
Front office personnel for the Colorado Rockies must be regretting their decision to farm out sales of World Series tickets to a purely online-only effort.
The team and their fans are experiencing a sports nightmare: a World Series that starts in Denver on Saturday with 20,000 tickets up for grabs, and no way to purchase them. TheDenverChannel.com reported on the frustrations of numerous fans who have been shut out of the high-tech ticket process.
Blame for the problem has been laid at the feet of unnamed malicious attackers, who caused the servers managed by Paciolan to shut down as thousands of fans hit the system. They and Major League Baseball have addressed the problem, according to a statement from the Rockies, and plan to try selling tickets again, online, starting at 2 pm EDT.
“Our partners at MLB.com and Paciolan have fully assessed the situation and assured us that tomorrow’s online sale will go as originally planned,” a Rockies spokesperson said.
Fark.com owner Drew Curtis told TheDenverChannel he was one of the many people shut off from the process, as he tried to buy tickets for his father, a Colorado resident.
“These idiots always have these consultants that tell them, ‘Sure, the server can handle the traffic,'” said Curtis. “In reality, that only works over the course of a day. If a zillion people hit the damn thing all at once, it goes boom. Think CNN on 9/11.”
Only about 500 tickets had been sold before the attacks took the system offline.