Colorado Rockies officials planned to relaunch their sale of World Series tickets Tuesday after the team said their first attempt to sell tickets online was stopped by an "external malicious attack".The Rockies were forced to stop the online-only sale of tickets after about two hours Monday after 8.5 million hits overwhelmed the servers set up to take the orders. Later spokesman Jay Alves announced that the ticket sales website had crashed because of an attack.
When asked if the team was prepared for another repeat Alves said: "We absolutely have backup plans in place," without elaborating. He referred questions about the attack to Irvine, Calif.-based Paciolan Inc., which runs the computers for the Rockies' World Series ticket sales.
However All of Pueblo wants to know: Did anyone in town get a World Series ticket on Monday?
At Robert Hoag Rawlings Public Library, computer screens flashed back-and-forth with www.coloradorockies.com for more than an hour.
But the dozen or so Internet users only read the same message over and over: "Please wait for the server to become available. The site is experiencing heavy overload."
Then came the heartbreaker: "This page cannot be displayed."
Then like machine-gun fire, the group of baseball fans attempting to buy tickets hit the "refresh" button on the Rockies Web site.
After more than an hour, many of the disappointed fans logged off and abandoned hope of scoring seats for home Games 3, 4 and, if needed, Game 5 of the best-of-seven World Series between the Rockies and Boston Red Sox.
Buying a World Series ticket Monday was harder than finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket after the Colorado Rockies’ server crashed with a reported 8.5 million hits in 90 minutes.
Aspen was not immune to the Rockies fever that sickened servers, as many residents spent much of the morning trying to get on to the website selling the only World Series tickets available to the public.
The Colorado Rockies are set to play the Boston Red Sox in the seven-game World Series, beginning Wednesday in Boston and coming to Denver on Saturday, Sunday and Monday (if necessary). It’s the Rockies’ first World Series appearance.
Aspen resident Greg Ricker was in the Pitkin County Library at 11 a.m. trying to buy tickets. Instead, all he got was frustrated with the blank pages popping up on the screen.
“It’s just frustrating,” said Ashley Boun of Aspen, who spent two hours trying to get tickets. “I don’t know why they didn’t just have a random lottery system. We’ve all been here with multiple screens going, and now I need to go to work.”
Shortly after midday, the Rockies announced they had suspended online ticket sales after were suspended after Paciolan, the Irvine, Calif., company that manages Rockies ticket sales, had a system-wide outage. Paciolan sells more than 100 million tickets to concerts, sporting events and other happenings annually, roughly 25 percent of all live events in the country.
The Rockies said fewer than 500 seats sold during the morning. Roughly 18,000 tickets are available for each game at Coors Field, or less than half stadium’s 50,449 seats. The other seats are available for season-ticket holders, the teams and Major League Basebal
Aspen Internet expert Farr Shepherd, owner of Decypher Technologies, said 8.5 million hits is extremely large and that numerous servers would have been necessary to handle the traffic. Shepherd said scalpers, who use computer programs with far faster Internet access, might have exacerbated the crash.
A Colorado Rockies spokesman said late Monday that an “external malicious attack” caused its website to crash, but tickets would go on sale at noon today.
source: Aspentimes.com
source: Aspentimes.com
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