About 4 hours ago. It seems that only a few people on this board managed to get in and get the tickets they wanted before then.
haha! Are you trying to make me feel guilty? You know I did think about it. The thing is, scanners have been hitting the site for days now and it never crashed before. Such sites are supposed to handle hundreds of continuous hits. What happened today was basically because the servers were not able to handle the heavy traffic caused by thousands of users trying to buy tickets on the site (not using the scanners). So yeah, nice try Come to think of it, my name will not be too popular in South Africa right now, specially among the people standing in lines for so long.
After all the seriousness of this morning this post made me crack up. No pun intended. I would think they would (and should) keep the availability to access tickets closed for a while on the internet and let the people standing in line catch up - I know they are after mainly Cat 4 tickets - but to make sure the system will operate for them at least for a while. Out of interest does anyone with IT knowledge know how the system can take so long to get back up? Unless there is an integrity issue I don't see why.
I think they are just trying to figure out why it crashed to make sure it doesnt happen again once it's up. Usually, a simple reboot works and I think they did try it cuz the site was up for a while and working fine after crashing. That didnt last long and in a matter of minutes it died again.
There's not much point getting the system back up if they think it's going to collapse again as soon as it gets a hammering. First they have to change something that will give it a chance of surviving. (Edit: Scorpyn78 beat me to it.)
I would hope they are putting a queuing system of some sort on line to restrict people accessing pages with 'real tickets' to whatever it can cope with. Quite amazing that they dont have it already really. Actually, I suspect there is no technical issue other than not being able to cope with load, so they have deliberately taken it off line and they'll quietly make the pages available tonight when everyone in Europe and America has gone home from work. I think this happened at start of phase V? I also hope they let the over the counter sales start up earlier. It's a bit irritating for us pressing F5 but hardly compares to queuing for 6+ hours outside a bank.
Do you know bruma flea market? I doubt there will be many, if any, cat 4 tickets left now.. now that the checkers, fnb's and ticketing centres are back up then they'll go very quickly.
Maybe they've found a way to allow just the OTC sale to be opened..? It's been headlines on the radio for the last hour.
They've removed the entire ticket section from the site...apparently it'll be back up at 6pm (SA Time) but I wouldnt hold my breath.
I dont see it either.. but i have the URL http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/organisation/ticketing/applyfor/index.html