Technical problems shut down Olympic ticket website forcing postponement of sale

VANCOUVER, B.C. - The Olympic motto is swifter, higher, stronger - but an online glitch Saturday morning left many would be ticket buyers grumpy, angry and inconvenienced.

They were among thousands who logged on to Tickets.com, the official ticket service provider for Vancouver 2010, hoping to snag some of the last remaining seats for the 2010 Winter Games.

Instead they found themselves trapped in virtual waiting room purgatory as two vital components of the ticketing website refused to acknowledge each other.

In response to the website woes, the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee postponed the sale of the final 100,000 tickets until 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 14.

Tickets.com said the problem was with the link between the virtual waiting room and the ticketing transaction site.

"Our team is working hard to resolve the issue," said Larry Witherspoon, CEO of Tickets.com. in a release apologizing for the inconvenience.

"We have a virtual waiting room that controls traffic into the transaction site," said Caley Denton, vice-president of ticketing for the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee. "They weren't talking to each other properly, so people weren't getting out of the waiting room into the site."

The problem was patched up within hours of the start of the Saturday-morning sale, but by then, Denton said there was concern some buyers might have given up.

"We really wanted to make sure we stuck to our fairness message," he said, in explaining the decision to postpone the sale for one week.

"We wanted to make sure we gave (buyers) the time to plan again and be able to get that fair access, versus turning it on at a time when people weren't prepared."

He couldn't estimate how many would-be purchasers were affected by the technical glitch but noted several hundred lucky buyers were able to scoop up tickets through the call centre.

Those sales will stand, but Denton said an equivalent number of tickets for each event will be pulled from the Olympic Family contingency pool and added to the Nov. 14 public sale to ensure online buyers get their fair crack.

The tickets available were for all events in the Vancouver area, including gold-medal hockey and the opening and closing ceremonies.

Tickets for events in Whistler, B.C., were not on sale because the transportation system can't handle any more people coming from outside the area.

Overall, 1.6 million tickets are being sold to the Games and organizers have committed to making sure 70 per cent of those go to the public.